Chapter Five

1

4:50pm, June 14. Dazzled by the evening brightness outside the bedroom window, I wake up to the happening suddenly. I remember I left the office at 12:20pm in the middle of the day because I was sick. Now, my headache’s gone, but still I feel my head swelled up as if it were filled with the toxic residues left from the painkillers.

In a deeper pang of guilty, I quickly dial the number of Inspector Wang Xiaoshan, saying that I would like to meet him at the Starbucks the sooner the better.

At 6:15pm, Xiaoshan rushes into the Starbucks, panting with the effort. He is wearing a white hooded vest over a white T-shirt, blue jeans showing off his long legs, and a baseball hat pulled down low over his eyes. He looks more comfortable in such casual dressing than in his police uniform.

When he recognizes me, he is somewhat surprised. Suppressing the mischievous smile on his face, he asks: “Hi, you…eh, have you been doing the cleaning at home this afternoon?”

Eh? What do you expect me to look like on my day off? Do I look like a Cinderella just because I have donned a leisure sports suit with my hair pulled straight back and tied into a ponytail by the neck? Come on. We are here for a coffee, not for a cocktail party. I give him the stink eye as he orders his coffee.

Xiaoshan tells me that he has also joined the investigation in Ren Jinran’s death case. As Jinran lived in a different district from Su Ya, which isn’t under his responsibility, he says he has offered himself up and asked for it voluntarily. Because he thinks Jinran’s case bears many similarities with that of Su Ya.

“Then, what have you found?” I ask, feeling myself sound like a police chief.

He takes off his baseball hat, tries hard to press down his unruly hair and reports to me as a matter-of-factly:“I hadn’t been home since the evening of June 11. I just rushed back for a shower before I came to see you. More than what I have found about her, I feel I have almost known her whole life!”

Yeah, I acknowledge he does look tired with dark bags under the eyes that can barely keep open due to sheer lack of sleep.

Ren Jinran’s mobile showed she made three calls to the same number in two days — once at 3:27pm on May 30 , twice at 1:32pm and a third one at 4:13pm on May 31. The duration of each call was 22 minutes, 6 minutes and 4 minutes 21 seconds respectively. It was the most dialed number in three days before people last saw her. Soon, Xiaoshan traced the owner of the number. It belonged to Meng Yu, director of the research center in the Paro Biomedical Research Co Ltd.

Meng Yu told Xiaoshan they had planned to meet at the Starbucks on June 1.

On May 30, Ren Jinran called Meng Yu. They had a nice little chat over the phone after having been barely in touch with each other for seven years. At 1:32pm on May 31, Jinran called him again, saying she would like to meet him the next day. At 4:13pm, she called to fix with him the time and place of the meeting. Everything was set according to Jinran’s arrangement, Meng Yu said.

Xiaoshan interrupted him with a very smart question: “You’d been waiting for her there for an hour on that day. Why didn’t you just give her a call?”

There were several incoming calls to Jinran’s mobile on the afternoon of June 1, but none was from Meng Yu.

On hearing this, Meng Yu stood up. He walked over to take the white uniform off the hook on the back of the door. Putting it on, he turned round his head and said calmly: “She’d be coming anyway, if she wanted.”

With these words, he excused himself and left for the lab.

What a coincidence! I have chosen to meet Xiaoshan at the same Starbucks as they did on Huaihai Road on that day. Now the two of us are sitting at a table by the window on the second floor, each holding a Venti Mango Blend in hand.

Propped on my elbows, I looked at the flow of people coming and going through the door to the Starbucks downstairs as I gauged the possible mood of Jinran at that time. I couldn’t help but feel somewhat grieved for her. Xiaoshan draws out of his pocket a photo and wags it under my nose like brushes of an angel’s wing.

“Hey, Hey, Jinran was definitely not what you might have guessed!” he says.

The woman smiling in the photo looks just stunning — thick eyebrows, single eyelids, eyes twinkling like stars on a summer night, red plump lips slightly open showing two rows of whit teeth, very neat. She isn’t a demure Snow White type. She has honey yellow skin that matches perfectly with her long black dress and her waist length hair curly glowed like red umber in the sun. She looks so outstandingly in dark that it only brought out her beauty instead of making her dull and plain — just like only the dark soil could accentuate the delicateness of the blooming flowers.

I can imagine what a campus love it was in the year of 2000 at the Fudan University! One was a captivating freshman at the School of Journalism, who was passionate and outgoing; the other was a promising young lecturer at the School of Biosciences, who was sentimentally sweet and gentle. Love between the two of them, especially when he was her first at the age of 19, was like a poem or a painting, so much colorful and romantic. It didn’t last long, though.

In 2003, Meng Yu married the woman he knew through a matchmaker. At that time, Jinran was still in her third year at school.

It was said the major interference in the affair came neither from the school nor the woman who later became Meng Yu’s wife, but from Meng Yu’s mother, Meng Yuzhen. Didn’t it sound like a story from the medieval times?

But parents interference in marriage has long been a Chinese tradition, hasn’t it? This old woman, Meng Yuzhen, came to the school. She found Ren Jinran and talked to her; she found Jinran’s class counselor and talked to him; she also went to the vice president of the School of Journalism to talk to him before she sought out all the department chiefs and talked to every one of them. Though the teacher-student love affair in the university was no longer a significant problem in the year 2000, no one could stand the wear and tear of a mother’s persistent complaints.

By the year 2002, Jinran was pregnant — very few people got to know this. At that time, Meng Yu was under huge pressure from the school to leave Jinran. Having blamed Meng Yu, though not outwardly, for not loving her enough to defy his mother, she went to have the abortion on her own. After that the two were said to officially break up. No matter how much they were reluctant to let go of each other, there wasn’t much they could do.

Since the fall of 2002, Meng Yuzhen had set her hand on arranging potential marriage dates for her son, almost a new date at every weekend. Perhaps sick and tired of his mother’s pushing, Meng Yu chose one of the girls arranged by his mother in the summer of 2003. After dating her particularly for three months, they got married.

An investigation into Jinran’s social relations also found one of her bosom friends, Huang Yue. Huang Yue, 29, college classmate of Jinran, is an office manager of the Hengda Real Estate Co Ltd. It was from her that Xiaoshan got to know many of Jinran’s private life in the past ten years.

Huang Yue said after the breakup, Jinran felt very distressed for a while, especially during the autumn of 2002 and the early summer of 2003. She would run into Meng Yu everywhere on campus, mostly because neither of them was ready to let go of their emotional compass which tended to lead where it was meant for them.

This week she’d swear never to see him again; next week they would be secretly reconciled. Of course, such happy moments never lasted for more than three day, because Meng Yu was always dating somebody else during the weekends, which made Jinran’s life desperately unbalanced.

However, since students started to leave school for their internship in June 2003, Jinran finally got the chance to forget him little by little in the new environment.

On Christmas Eve in 2003, she went out dancing with Jason at a bar on Changle Road and didn’t return throughout the night. Jason came from California. The fair-hair and blue-eyed young man had been courting her in the last two months. They had been franticly in love for more than half a year before Jinran moved to live with another tall handsome guy from Sweden. By that time, the internship program for the undergraduates had entered its substantial stage, which meant students could decide whether they would like to live on or off the campus.

At an old classmates reunion one year after graduation, Jinran came with a Frenchman called Jacque. Jacque loved cycling. With him, her skin turned golden wheat due to lots of sunshine and her muscles hardened and became strong. They had been together for as long as three years until one day Jacque proposed to her. All of a sudden, she got the cold feet and ran away without a notice. She turned her phone off and asked for a leave of absence from work. Huang Yue said it made Jacque so crazy that he had no choice but to call her to ask about Jinran’s whereabouts at all hours of the day and night.

“Don’t you presume that Jinran turned to the sensual pleasures of life because she couldn’t forget Meng Yu,” — a statement Xiaoshan said Huang Yue repeatedly emphasized.

Since Christmas in 2003, Jinran had become happier and happier. She was even happier than when she was with Meng Yu at their very best. It was the kind of real happiness that was fulfilling and outgoing. She would often laugh loudly. She was no longer emotionally sensitive about what others would think. Her limbs, having lost their girlish rigidity, became more relaxing stretched, which made her look taller than she could have ever been. Either to sit or stand, she seemed confident and comfortable. With her wavy hair flowing behind her and the vivid expressions on her face showing the constant changes in mood, she was blooming marvelous.

More than once she told Huang Yue those simple-minded guys had given her the real fun of love. She loved them, not just for fun, she grew up on them as she saw “a better ME” in herself who was neither skeptical of others nor critical of herself. Though her first love with Meng Yu was unforgettable, she said it wasn’t until now that she came to realize what true love should be like.

In those days, Meng Yu was such a person that he had a great many characteristics liked by the girls. He was neat in appearance, very polite and self-disciplined. He had tremendous charisma in class that you would want to hear every word of his lecture based on some extensive research and his opinions were always original. It was hard to imagine such an exclusive character as him, once fell in love, would become very much dependent on the other part for all his needs.

Except that when she had class to attend, Meng Yu would demand Jinran spend the rest of her time with him. If he didn’t see her for just one day, the pay phone at the doorman’s for the entire students’ dormitory building would be ringing like a public hotline. In Jinran’s words, it was like Meng Yu had sucked every minute of the time out of her day. The more she knew about Meng Yu, the more she was attracted to him. What a splendid world he had in his brain! Though he rarely talked to others in his daily life, he seemed very eager to present Jinran all the good ideas of his or share with her every piece of his feeling. Sometimes he would suddenly wake up at the startling changes in himself. “Ah, how come I became such a bubbly chatterbox!” he would pat his forehead and say.

Meng Yu was very punctual and very exact in every detail of life. Since he started dating Jinran, the request had been extended to his lover. He knew he was excellent, which gave him the reason for pointing out the defect of others. Like a responsible teacher, he would point out to Jinran what’s wrong with this or what’s wrong with that in an effort to improve her. But people in love always wished they would show the best part to their partner. Most disliked having others make them feel wrong. Meng Yu’s fault-finding habit often made Jinran nervous. She felt so happy, but at the same time didn’t know know where to put her foot right, when she was with him.

There was no sort of standard for the rules of how lovers should accommodate each other. It was especially so if it was for first-time lovers. No one’s gonna tell you how many hours per day you two should be together to feel close enough. How much was she willing to know about you to mean “she cared for you”? When it was your time to take the lead and when it was her turn? How much space you would take up in your relationship so that both of you got the room you need to be yourself?

Meng Yu’s Jinran would always be late for 10 to 20 minutes for their date. And this became “very her” behavior he remembered of her after so many years. Jinan was once trying very hard to live up to all of Meng Yu’s standards, except for her being late. Her lateness was deliberate. She just wanted Meng Yu to know that it takes two to tango. In this magnificent love affair, Meng Yu wasn’t the only one who created everything. She, also existed.

According to what Huang Yue had said, it couldn’t have been any better that Jinran had broken up with Meng Yu. But what made her want to see Meng Yu after seven years of separation? If she bought a birthday cake especially for the occasion, why would she remain hidden upstairs when he showed up?

“Wang-Xiao-Shan!” I shout at him, “Were you investigating a case or prying into the affairs of others? No wonder you stayed awake for three days and three nights!”

Xiaoshan seems to be very much used to taking the verbal abuse from others. He doesn’t get the least angry when he hears me call his names.

Opening his palms to show his innocence, he explains: “You see getting to know the intimate details of a victim is part of our job. Only in this way can we find out the truth murderer. The biggest privacy of the victim was who had killed her, wasn’t it?”

On hearing his words, I star at him with my eyes open as wild as they could be. “Hey, you, you just said the victim and murderer. You knew it wasn’t suicide, didn’t you?” I ask, pointing my finger at his nose.

Xiaoshan can’t help but laugh when he sees my reaction at the moment. He leans his head closer to my side and whispers in my ear: “Don’t know yet if it a murder or not. But I am looking into the case as a murder. Because in the previous case of Su Ya — it was probably murder!”

Through his voice, I can tell he is so proud of himself.

At 6:58pm on the evening of June 14, I get to know some important clues to Su Ya’s case from Xiaoshan.

Do you remember the empty box I found in the master bathroom? It was right there on the glass shelf, blue and white, with the trademark name DORCO printed on the side and the lid of the box open. The ones used to cut Xu Mingzhi’s face and slit Su Ya’s throat were both DORCO blades, a merchandise which is rarely seen in the market. However, there was not a single fingerprint on the box.

If Su Ya took out two pieces of DORCO from the box on May 15, how could she never have left her fingerprints on the box? Did she put on the gloves consciously and wipe the box clean of the fingerprints before she took suicide? Suppose she got the blades from other sources, then how come the box was put on the shelf without a helping hand?

The only explanation was that on May 15 there were two blades left in the box. One was taken by Su Ya, which she used it to cut Mingzhi’s face. The other was taken by the murderer. It might be a improvising idea that he used the blade in the box. So, after he killed Su Ya, he carefully removed the traces that showed his last access. And of course, the previous fingerprints left by Su Ya were wiped out as well.

Still there remained one of the biggest doubt: how come neither used gloves nor wrapping papers for the blades were found in Su Ya’s apartment?

There wasn’t a fingerprint on the blade found on the ground floor of Huiyang Department Store, so Su Ya must have had her gloves on. It was possible that she might have got rid of the gloves on her way out. But how to explain the missing piece of wrapping paper for the blade? Where was the wrapping paper for the last piece of blade that gashed Su Ya’s throat? Plus, all the dustbins in the apartment rooms were found empty.

I, too, have shared my clues with Xiaoshan. I tell him someone has continued sending new posts to the online forum via Su Ya’s ID even after her death. Right before I left home to meet him in the cafe, I dug out a third one, dated at 9:26am on June 14. It is very brief, but precise.

～～

The third one, Ren Jinran.

I said I would let you know.

If you still don’t know, I will continue telling my stories. W, stop me if you can.

～～

If Ren Jinran is the third, then Su Ya the second, Xu Mingzhi must be the first. Isn’t that the logic of the murderer?

The suspect has committed a series of crimes, apparently to let someone know his existence and to reveal the purpose of each incident. And for the first time, W is mentioned in the latest post.

I look at Wang Xiaoshan from head to toe, wondering if this W refers to him? Is this going to be a contest between a serial killer and the police? But look at him, a thoughtless, giddy young man with little sobriety in his manners and less in his countenance. In whatever the way, he looks the least likely to live up to the expectations of the killer.

2

As the new drug trial of Ai-De-Kang runs headlong into an unanticipated crisis due to the death of the No.35 patient, the Paro Pharmaceuticals is also shaken by this serial “suicides scandal.”

Within four working days before the third weekend in June, between June 15 and 18, the red copper shaft of the revolving door to the grand lobby of Huahang Mansion has worn out a complete layer as reporters eager for news come in throngs to the Paro. The market department has to transfer a specialized team of people to deal with the media. Lu Tianlan instructed that everyone should try his or her best to deny whatever is asked of linking to the deaths, unless it is out of absolute necessity.

Except for the swarms of reporters, wuya.com has done a timely special report on the Paro suicides scandal over new drug trial. I read the web page on the morning of June 15.

To be honest, the situation here with Ren Jinran is different from that of Su Ya. Jinran was from a divorced family. When she was little, her father disappeared, never to be seen again. In 2006, her mother died of heart attack.

After Su Ya’s death, her parents, Su Huaiyuan and Qi Xiuzhen, has been running around to seek legal advice about how to sue the company. But nobody has so far stood up for Jinran.

So, Jinran’s death, though as the second patient in the target group who committed suicide — in the same way, whose impact to the drug trial ought to be more grave on the Paro Pharmaceuticals, actually means nothing, or less than nothing if details of her death were not intentionally leaked out to the public.

It can’t be the police who disclosed the confidential information, of course.

Lu Tianlan is for the moment very angry, but she isn’t very keen to trace whoever should be responsible for this open hostility. Her attitude toward the matter makes me think of one person only — Xu Chen.

Xu Chen once said to Tianlan: “…it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to listen to me. I’m here to make a bet with you…hum…on the next Su Ya. According to my experience, her death is just the beginning. One suicide often leads to another. Suicide among the same group people is contagious, believe it or not?”

It seems he has won. Instead of coming to Tianlan to claim his prize, he intentionally leaked some amounts of information, so that the Paro has to suspend the clinical trials under public pressure. Thus, he won’t be responsible for all the troubles.

We have meetings with Tianlan almost every day.

“Any progress in the investigation?” “Have you got any new ideas?” “How much change do you have to win in court next month?” Those are the questions she asks at the meeting.

The court trial is somehow delayed. It seems the prosecutors considered the recent hearsay to be in favor of them and they asked for a continuance to have time to gather more evidence.

Under the present situation, the longer the trial proceeds, the more the risk Paro will take. How long can we deny that Ren Jinran was the No.35 patient in the target group? How long on earth can the clinical trials go on, braving all rebuffs, as the director of the clinical pharmacology center eagerly shrinks from such a responsibility under continuous media pressure and a mounting public outcry?

At the meeting, to address the repeated questions of Tianlan, all He Ying can do is to sits up straight, open her notebook, and reiterate the early proceedings from May 25. She is sensible enough to know it just isn’t the right time to poke fun at each other as close friends. She knows if she starts from the Memo on June 14, there would be no progress to report but passive defense.

Screwing the pen cap on and off, Tianlan listens to He Ying’s work report patiently at all times. “Hum, that’s it. Ask Meng Yu to re-check the laboratory data and tell him to come to me at the company headquarters tomorrow,” she will thus tell He Ying, as if, all of a sudden, much of her hope has been transferred from the law affairs department to the research center.

The effective sample size taking part in the Ai-De-Kang trials is shrinking, to be more specific, it has been diminishing for some inexplicable reason — via death. Despite its inauspicious samples, the laboratory data aren’t looking optimistic.

On the fourth week into the clinical trials, patients on the placebo group kept its improvement rate at 67 percent while those on the drug group had a rise to 81 percent. On the fifth week, the placebo group showed an improvement of 82 percent while the drug group unpleasantly plumped to 69 percent. That’s enough to drive anyone crazy! Theoretically, when the trials head into its second week, it is expected to see a significant and steady improvement in the therapeutic efficiency of Ai-De-Kang. But now, the drug, of which the Paro had set their expectations pretty high, is actually no better than those placebos made of sugar and flour.

The results of the experiment are so embarrassing that once the media knows about it, plus the recent suicide case of Ren Jinran, the Paro Pharmaceuticals is bound to lose the case of Su Ya in court. If the company fails to win, the marketing plan for Ai-De-Kang will be doomed and the economic loss to the Paro shall escalate beyond imagination.

“Zhou You, what do you have in mind?” Tianlan asks.

How come it is my turn to answer the questions? I am just looking out the window, staring at a cloud that looks like a sheep and thinking about why the killer has chosen Jinran his No. 3 victim.

I take a sudden fall from the tip of the cloud as Tianlan turns her sharp eyes upon me. I know I have to say something, but I am never very good at making things up on the spot. “I…I think both Su Ya and Ren Jinran were murdered. This is a serial murder case. I have been looking into it these days, eh… but I haven’t found the motivation for the killings,” I speak up in a little voice more than a murmur. When I finish, I regret having said so promptly.

“Phew,” Tianlan makes a soft breathing sound in her throat, which sounds more like a dry laugh when one is startled. She looks up to find He Ying looking at her with her inquiring eyes. The two of them then burst out laughing indulgently, one with hands pressing the breast and the other covering the face.

“Good on you! Fairly good on you,” Tianlan says, “If they were murdered, all my problems would be gone. Zhou, I do hope that you are not sleep talking.”

3

According to Huang Yue, between the Christmas of 2003 and the spring of 2009, Ren Jinran lived a life filled with happiness. All of a sudden, she learned to indulge herself, like a picky eater baby who would simply push away the plate if she disliked the food. She was in love with love which brought her true healing and comfort. Those three years she lived with Jacque was heavenly, she said to Huang, if only those days would last for 100 years.

“But you said it was she who refused Jacque’s proposal, no?” Xiaoshan was confused.

Yes, it was she. Before the week-long Spring Festival holiday in 2008, Jacque requested to take his annual leave to see his parents. He also asked for five more days off work to prolong the holiday. He obliged Jinran to do the same. Both of them left Shanghai on February 6, the Eve of Chinese New Year. Jacque took Jinran to Lyon, his hometown, where they met Jacque’s parents and the sisters. On February 13, the two dropped by in Amsterdam for sightseeing. On the next day, the Valentine’s Day, Jacque proposed.

Actually Jacque’s intention to take Jinran on a trip home in France at this time of the year was obvious. It was the Chinese New Year, best time for family reunion and to meet the in-laws according to Chinese traditions. However, Jinran had never been thinking this way until she was presented with an engagement ring.

On the second day after they arrived in Shanghai when Jacque came back from work, he found Jinran disappeared. Her suitcase was gone, her mobile was shut off, the landline in the office was unanswered, and she didn’t even leave a message to say why. There was no trace of her anywhere as if she had never existed in the past three years.

There are many reasons why man may get cold feet, Xiaoshan commented, but he’s never thought that woman will get the cold feet, too.

If it weren’t for the engagement ring, Jinran herself would never have come to realize the secret, which was actually key to the fun spirit of her relationship with men. After Meng Yu, those with whom she hanged out were all foreigners. They spoke different native languages and grew up in different home environments. Either he spoke her language or she spoke his, a soul to soul communication was limited to only a few symbolic expressions. Nobody would feel offended or displeased due to such a nature boundary of birth.

As is often said, simplicity is the key to happiness. However, when the time came to seriously consider marriage, Jinran hesitated. She couldn’t bear the thought of her husband, presumed to be the most intimate person in her life, being destined not to understand 80 percent of her delicate feelings, smart ideas, and reasons for all her eccentricities.

It horrified her to imagine she would spend the rest of her life in a large house raising a dozen kids. Every year, the family would get happily together to celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Spring Festival. Thanks to her admiring husband, she might as well be the East Beauty for 50 years, or maybe longer, as if the Ren Jinran as who she was never had existed in this world.

People often complain others about not fully understanding them. Actually how much do they understand themselves? Were she not agitated by the marriage proposal, Jinran wouldn’t have discovered herself the secret that she would rather hide away than to live with.

Having heard all the stories from Huang Yue, Xiaoshan came to understand that Jinran was actually a woman of extraordinary intelligence and understanding. She could be totally a different person when she wasn’t thinking. But once she started to think seriously, she was quickly aware that the kind of communication or understanding that she so much craved for was exactly the source of her pain. Take her love for Meng Yu for example, her weariness came from Meng Yu’s endless desire to present her the innermost thoughts of himself; her grumbles came from Meng Yu’s lack of interest in reading into her needs or desires; and her nervousness came from her efforts to hide her real disappointment. Therefore, neither would be relieved of the pain until one day, they both gave up their efforts to go single-sidedly on communication.

So, she came to a conclusion, people are destined to be alone. Either they are married or not, people feel lonely for different reasons anyway.

In the spring of 2008, Jinran moved into Room 2204 of Jiangning Apartment alone. She also found herself a new job as manager of the Planning Department at the Bosi Decoration Materials Co Ltd. Three months later, Jacque likewise gave up the search for her.

Jinran started an “intentionally single” life. She had a few male pals, but none was too close. She was still always in a good mood and happy, but it was no longer the kind of heartless, careless happiness that might send her flying at any moment. She had acquired a sense of tranquil optimism, which according to Huang Yue almost scared her. Huang Yue said she didn’t like this state of tranquility of Jinran, behind which she saw a resolute woman who seemed to have made up her mind to spend the rest of her life all by herself.

After a whole year living in solitude, Jinran suddenly became depressed. She used to talk to Huang Yue about her feelings that she felt very lonely living alone. She said she found men were such pathetic animals that when two lived together, either would feel more estranged; but once alone, one couldn’t help wanting to hear the breath of the other in the room. This time nevertheless she didn’t choose to live with a man for a cure. Perhaps once it had been thought through, such a practice was meaningless, much of its effectiveness would then be lost.

On May 15, 2009, Jinran began to take some anti-depression drugs according to her medical record. After eight months, she stopped her medication. But again she resumed her treatment on November 27. Since May 8, 2010, she had taken part in a clinic trial at the Pharmacology Center of Rui’an Hospital, which was designed to test a new drug for moderate depression, Ai-De-Kang.

She was placed in the drug group, not the placebo. The drug proved quite effective in cheering her up. The May 22 assessment of her situation two weeks after commencing medication and the May 29 assessment in the following week showed her depressive symptoms had almost gone and she was actually high spirited. She didn’t show up on June 5 for the fourth week review. Her body had started to decay by then.

As a matter of fact, the killer isn’t accurate in his numbering of the victims. Strictly speaking, the decaying corpse should be the No.3 and No.4 victims. Jinran was over eight weeks pregnant.

“Who is the father of the fetus?” Xiaoshan asked.

Huang Yue felt at a loss as to how to respond to this question. But she told Xiaoshan there was another person who must have known more about Jinran’s private life as they shared all secrets about each other!

That person was also a classmate of theirs who used to sleep in the top bunk while Jinran took the bottom bunk during the college years. Huang Yue torn off a pad of paper, wrote down the person’s work place, telephone number and name and handed it to Wang Xiaoshan, which read Xinshen Evening News Feature Department, 6279-2424, Xu Mingzhi.

Hearing thus far, I pound the table and interrupt Xiaoshan: That’s right!

So far as I can remember, the serial special report on the 5.15 Huiyang Department Store Disfigurement Case at wuya.com did mention such a detail. It says before Xu Mingzhi had her face slit, she was just texting a message to her friend Ren Jinran.

However, to avoid the savage online witch hunt from the Internet users, Mingzhi had asked for leave from work and left Shanghai in a rush as early as on May 29. There is no news of her whereabouts so far.

If Jinran were murdered, it would have been Jinran herself who opened the door for the killer because the entry door is not damaged and the lock is secure! Her lying in bed with only the pajamas on only proves that the two were intimately related. Nothing was found to indicate a violent struggle before she died. The blade was thrust way into her artery with one quick force, which means she was totally unsuspecting. She was comfortable to close her eyes for a rest right in front of him. Everything would be well explained, if the killer were Jinran’s secret boyfriend. But before Mingzhi could come forward to prove the story, all these were only hypothesis. The clue was broken again.

“It’s all because of you. You have misled me!” I complain to Bill on MSN. “You said the killer wouldn’t have considered attacking other targets but Xu Mingzhi. You slackened my vigilance. You helped the killer lower my guard. You are his accomplice, aren’t you?”

Bill doesn’t reply. He waits patiently till I finish venting my anger. Sending a cup of coffee icon to my dialogue box, he slowly replies: “Hi Miss, I am a barber who cuts the hair. How am I suppose to know what’s under the scalp of the killer?”

It’s 2:17am, the early morning of June 15. I have lost my sleep again.

I sigh wearily as I type, word by word: “What to do...what to do...what to do...”

He replies: “Let me think about it.”

For a complete five minutes, no more words are sent.

Well, how stupid I am to count on a barber to give me a hand. I prompt him with two successive screen flash vibrations. After another two to three seconds, Bill finally responds. One painful line at a time, it reads:

It was the killer who wrote the posts and intended to let us know —

This is an ongoing case of serial murder and he himself is the murderer.

That’s your last conclusion, isn’t it?

You once said the special way he used to fix the things may help us find him, didn’t you?

So even if the clue was broken.

It doesn’t matter.

The killer will speak soon!

*

(Translated from the Chinese by Xu Qin)