Fate (Death Notice Book 2)

by Zhou HaoHui

‘The search for the rest of body yielded results almost immediately. Some officers discovered another black plastic bag in a rubbish heap on Yanling Road. The bag contained five kilograms of human flesh, including two more fingers. Just before noon the same day, a member of the public discovered a bundle wrapped in an old bedsheet in some undergrowth beside the highway in east Chengdu. Inside the bundle was a third plastic bag, also containing fingers and slices of human flesh, as well as a complete set of women’s underwear folded with machine-like precision. But that was the last thing we found. We never found any other remains.’

  ‘So, to summarise, you found three bags of the victim’s sliced-up flesh, along with a suitcase containing her head and internal organs,’ Pei said.

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Those three plastic bags couldn’t have weighed more than about fourteen kilograms, right? In other words, at least half of the victim went undiscovered, including the rest of her skeleton.’

  ‘Yes,’ Huang said, his face heavy with disappointment. ‘We tried to analyse why that might have been. We concluded that the killer had probably used a more clandestine method to dispose of the other parts of the body: burial or incineration, or perhaps removal to a remote location outside Chengdu. There were rumours too, of course – which, I should add, were unsubstantiated.’

  ‘That the killer ate the rest of the body, you mean?’ Pei said, recalling what Ms Mu had mentioned moments earlier. ‘We can dismiss that possibility outright – why would a cannibal keep the bones but throw away so much meat?’

  ‘What if it was a ritual killing?’ Ms Mu asked.

  Huang shook his head. ‘We considered that as well. But there was nothing about the human remains or what had been done to them that indicated any correlation with known cult or ritualistic practices.’

  He pulled out another cigarette, lit it and took several hungry drags. ‘We didn’t get any useful leads from the missing persons database, so I saw no option but to publish a notice in Chengdu’s most widely read newspapers. We included a photo of a piece of the victim’s red down jacket – the same picture you were shown in school, Ms Mu. On the fifteenth of January, three female students from a vocational college contacted the task force and told us that one of their roommates hadn’t been seen for several days. And the down jacket in the papers looked exactly like the one she usually wore.

  ‘The task force immediately brought the girls in to examine the jacket. All three were positive that it belonged to their roommate. At that point, I was 90 per cent sure that we’d identified the victim. The girls asked to see the body, but I didn’t want them to. It was enough to turn the stomach of even the toughest cop. But they insisted, so eventually I gave in – after all, they shared the same room for an entire year.

  ‘As soon as one of the girls saw the head, her eyes grew as wide as saucers. She yelled out “It’s her!” and curled up like a shrimp, and everything started flying out of her – tears, mucus, spit. It was not a pleasant sight. But it was a massive breakthrough for the investigation. After the students left, we contacted the missing roommate’s parents. They lived only two hours away from headquarters, so they arrived later that day.’

  Ms Mu let out a long exhale through her nose. ‘Was it their daughter?’

  ‘By the time they left, we had officially confirmed the victim’s identity: Feng Chunling, a second-year student of finance and accounting at Chengdu Vocational and Technical College.’

  ‘What day did she go missing?’ Pei asked.

  ‘She was last seen leaving the college on the morning of the ninth of January.’

  ‘The girl was missing for five whole days?’ Ms Mu asked, stunned. ‘And none of the other students noticed? How did the college explain that?’

  ‘It was the end of the semester. Classes were over and the entire campus was busy preparing for final exams. No one at the college realised that Feng Chunling had gone missing. Most of her friends simply assumed that she was studying on her own. Her roommates noticed her absence of course, but they didn’t think anything of it.’

  ‘Her roommates didn’t think anything of her having gone missing for several days?’ Pei said.

  ‘As I mentioned, Feng’s home was relatively close to the school. They assumed she was studying at home. If it hadn’t been for the notice we published in the papers, our search would probably have taken at least several days longer.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like the victim was very close to her roommates.’

  Huang nodded. ‘Feng appeared to be a normal college student: average height and build, just shy of twenty. According to her classmates, however, she was introverted, bordering on antisocial at times. She rarely interacted with her roommates. When she was in her room, she usually had her head in a book. She spent most of her spare time off campus, but we had little idea of where she went, what she did or who she associated with.’

  ‘I take it you had a hard time coming up an accurate picture of her social life?’

  ‘No kidding. If it had been now, it would have been so much easier – we could have just checked her mobile. But back then our officers had to do things the old-fashioned way – by interviewing people and hoping they’d give us useful answers. Since the victim kept to herself, it proved extremely difficult to get any leads.’

  ‘And how did you conduct the search?’

  ‘We had no option but to go for the simplest method: the old needle-in-a-haystack approach.’

  Pei nodded approvingly. ‘More often than not, the simplest approach is also the most effective. Provided you have the manpower.’

  ‘Manpower wasn’t an issue. Chengdu’s public security bureau bowed to public pressure and pledged that they would solve the case within a year. That decision effectively mobilised the city’s entire police force to assist with the investigation and we immediately launched a citywide manhunt. Our search radius covered two specific areas and targeted three types of individual. The vocational college was at the centre of the search radius, since that was where the victim was based. We investigated just about every student and faculty member at the college and conducted interviews at shops, restaurants and other public spaces in the vicinity of the college.’

  ‘Did that produce any leads?’

  ‘We didn’t come up with any suspects. We did discover that Feng Chunling used to frequent a number of music stores and bookshops near the college’s main entrance. And we were told that she hadn’t been seen in any of them since the tenth of January. But the more we considered that information, the more irrelevant it seemed.’

  ‘And how did you decide on the search radius?’

  ‘The four locations in which the victim’s remains were discovered happened to form the corners of a square. Given the logistical difficulty of lugging all four bundles at the same time, we concluded that the suspect would have made four separate trips to dispose of the remains. Our psychologist advised us that he would have avoided retracing his steps. So it followed that the murder had been committed somewhere within that square. We therefore concentrated our search on the large area formed by the square and on the college itself, including the music shops and bookstores near the entrance.’

  ‘And was that productive?’ Pei asked.

  Huang shook his head.

  Pei rubbed his palms together. ‘You said you focused on three types of individual…?’

  ‘Doctors, butchers and migrant workers. Judging by the amount of damage done to the body, the killer had a strong stomach and was skilled at dissection. Doctors and butchers were obvious matches. Migrant workers, as we know, come from the lower rungs of society and are responsible for a disproportionately high number of violent crimes.’

  ‘Did that not throw up any leads?’

  ‘Not one,’ Huang said, lowering his head. His mouth twisted as he flicked some ash from his cigarette.

  ‘This guy was good at what he did, that’s for sure,’ Pei murmured. In all fairness, the police force’s strategy of one search radius,
two areas and three types of suspect was a well-established one. But in this instance it hadn’t netted a single result. Either the killer had stayed one step ahead of them or their approach was fundamentally flawed. ‘It seems the needle-in-a-haystack method wasn’t the best. What else did you find at the locations where the body parts were left?’

  ‘It snowed in Chengdu on the twelfth of January,’ Huang said softly, ‘starting at midnight and only letting up at around nine in the morning. The snowfall destroyed any footprints, fingerprints or other traces that the suspect might have left when dumping the victim’s remains. We deduced that the killer picked that day because of the weather conditions.’

  ‘I agree with your conclusions. That guy calculated his every move.’ Pei thought for a moment. ‘Did you discover anything more about how he dissected and prepared the body? That could have given you a few leads.’

  Huang shot him a sorrowful look. ‘We thought the same thing, but it proved fruitless. The plastic bags the body parts were wrapped in were the sort that could have come from any market or department store. The suitcase containing the victim’s head and entrails was unremarkable and its make and signs of wear and tear indicated that it was at least five years old. It would have been a wild goose chase to try to track down its whereabouts across the last half decade.’

  Pei shook his head in sympathy. ‘It’s as if the killer planned for every eventuality.’

  ‘The suspect seemed to be eerily familiar with our investigations procedures. No matter what approach we took, he’d already anticipated it. The task force and I worked on this case day and night for months, and all without a single tangible result. In the end I felt I had no choice but to swallow my pride and seek out Captain Ding Ke.’

  ‘Captain Ding,’ Pei muttered. ‘He’d retired, what, eight years before the Bagman Killing? But he’d continued to lend you quite a bit of assistance, is that right?’

  ‘Correct on both counts. He was essentially my mentor. Whenever I hit a stumbling block in an investigation, I’d ask for his help. He was hiding out in the suburbs at the time, tending to his birds and flowers. The simple life, so to speak. Even though he was already greying at the temples, he seemed much more energetic than he’d ever been as a cop. He never looked very happy to see me though. He used to say that each of my visits took days off his life.’

  Pei understood that all too well. Police work wasn’t a job everyone could handle. Once you began investigating a case, it took precedence over everything else.

  ‘So what happened when you asked Captain Ding on this occasion?’ Ms Mu asked impatiently.

  ‘He complained, as usual. But once he’d finished his grumbling, he took a long close look at the case files. Then he told me to come back in a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks! He’d never spent so much time on a case before.’

  ‘Was there a reason for that specific length of time?’

  ‘It was the deadline he’d given himself to crack the case. On previous investigations he’d mostly told me to come back in a day or two. Five if he needed more time. Never more than a week. When I went back, he’d make a few comments and maybe ask a question or two. Barely a dozen words in all, but I could tell that he’d distilled long hours of thinking into each point. Every time I returned to an investigation after meeting Captain Ding, it was like my vision had cleared. Like answers were staring me in the face. Every single time.’

  ‘And this time?’ Pei asked.

  Huang glanced at both officers and his face darkened. ‘You already know what happened.’

  ‘You never saw him again,’ Ms Mu said.

  ‘Having to wait a couple of weeks was hard enough. But then when I went back to his home, I was absolutely blindsided to find out that he’d already moved. No one knew where he’d gone or how to get in touch with him.’

  Ms Mu’s empathy did not dull her tongue. ‘Seems to me he was intentionally avoiding you.’

  ‘The case must have stumped him,’ Pei said, changing the subject.

  ‘I can’t say for sure. All I know is that I never saw him again.’

  Pei looked down at the table and shook his head. It was disappointing that someone of Captain Ding’s calibre would run away rather than face his own inability to solve a case. The man had broken his word.

  ‘Even Captain Ding gave up on it,’ Ms Mu said, sighing. ‘Was there any progress with the investigation after that?’

  Huang gave them a pained smile. ‘I won’t lie to you. We were absolutely desperate when we lost touch with Captain Ding. But I was captain of the criminal police and however hopeless things seemed, I had to put on my bravest face and pretend that everything was going smoothly. Over the next few months, my officers and I went through the city with a fine-tooth comb. But, just as we’d anticipated, we never found so much as a trace of the suspect. To try and assuage the public outcry surrounding the investigation, I resigned as captain at the end of the year.’

  Ms Mu’s eyes softened as she looked at Huang.

  Unexpectedly, he managed a slight grin. ‘Believe it or not, leaving the police felt liberating. The case had turned me into a nervous wreck.’

  ‘You and Captain Ding both chose to run away from the investigation,’ Ms Mu said, ‘but you responded differently. You may not be a police officer any more, but you haven’t forgotten about the case. Even after it was officially classified as a cold case, you continued searching for the killer. You’ve never really given up on it – am I correct?’

  Huang’s eyes flashed. ‘I’m going to make that killer pay. I don’t care if it takes ten years. Hell, I don’t care if it takes the rest of my life!’ Having made his declaration, the rage faded from his face. ‘Actually, the reason I opened this bar was to try and draw the killer out into the open,’ he said. ‘What did you think of the music you heard when you walked in earlier?’

  ‘Suffocating,’ Pei said.

  ‘A fitting soundtrack for the bloody theatrics happening on the stage.’ Ms Mu shuddered as she recalled the ‘performance’ downstairs, which had resembled a scene from a horror movie. The actor had invited a member of the audience to stab the half-naked actress on stage. Blood – fake blood, she presumed – had come spurting out of the woman’s chest. ‘That show surely came close to crossing any number of legal boundaries,’ she said. ‘And as for the boundaries of good taste…’

  ‘It’s all sleight of hand. No one’s ever been injured in those performances – the blood is made by a little shop downtown.’ Huang smiled politely at Ms Mu. ‘Now, tell me more about how the music made the two of you feel when you walked in,’ he said.

  ‘There was fear in there, and desperation,’ Pei said. ‘It felt relentless – pounding away in your head, the shrieking and growling, the heavy guitar, the drums. In some people it could definitely stir up all sorts of unhealthy thoughts. Perhaps even violent fantasies.’

  ‘Precisely. You mentioned “suffocating” just now. In fact, the track you heard when you came in was by a band called Suffocation. The first time I heard it, I could barely believe that a group of people had actually rehearsed that and recorded it. But a week later, I couldn’t drag myself away from it.’

  After lighting yet another cigarette, Huang walked across the room and pulled a hefty evidence bag from the bedside table in the corner. Returning to Pei and Ms Mu, he held up the bag for them. ‘Take a good look,’ he said. ‘All the music I play during the performances downstairs comes from these cassettes. I first listened to them late one night in the winter of 1993. Just me and my headphones. By the time I’d finished, I was sweating like a dog in August. I felt like the whole world was full of death and violence, totally desperate and with nowhere to run.’

  Pei nodded slowly. He had felt the same way downstairs. He looked inside the transparent bag. The tapes were covered in English words and had holes punched through the sides.

  The sight of the tapes brought a rush of memories. Although CDs were now popular, cassettes had flooded the Chinese music market b
ack in the eighties and nineties. ‘Are these tapes related to the January 12th case?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘They belonged to the victim. They’re da kou dai purchased from one of the music stores near the university.’

  ‘What’s a da kou dai?’ Pei asked, rolling the unfamiliar term around his tongue.

  Ms Mu grinned in surprise. ‘Guess you’re too old for this one, Captain Pei. They’re exactly as described – literally “hole-punched tapes”. You see, when music stores abroad were overstocked with cassette tapes, they’d punch a small hole through the edge of each cassette and sell the excess stock to China as waste plastic. Generally speaking, the holes didn’t pierce the tape itself, so the cassettes were still playable. These da kou dai tapes made their way into China’s underground music market. All of my friends had them back in senior school and university.’

  ‘The task force collected these tapes to dust them for prints,’ Huang said. ‘According to Feng’s classmates, she was extremely fond of this particular set of tapes. If someone had got close to her, they might have left prints on them. Unfortunately, forensics weren’t able to find anything of value. The tapes were never officially classified as evidence. Probably a slip-up, but eventually the task force forgot all about them. I stumbled across these the night I decided to retire. I don’t know why I kept them, but I did.’

  ‘And then one night you listened to them,’ Ms Mu said.

  ‘It wasn’t an easy experience,’ Huang said. ‘Until that night, the heaviest music I’d ever listened to was probably Cui Jian’ – Pei nodded imperceptibly at that name; even he was familiar with the so-called ‘Father of Chinese rock’ – ‘or the Carpenters. But what I got out of it more than made up for any discomfort.’ Huang’s voice cracked and he sipped from his glass of tea. ‘Listening to this music is what helped me truly understand Feng Chunling. It also gave me an insight into the sort of people she hung out with.

  ‘When I was leading the task force, we used what we knew about Feng Chunling to create a rough psychological profile – lonely, introverted, emotionally uncomplicated. But as far as I was concerned, the feelings this music triggered in me completely subverted our original profile. Before I’d listened to it, I’d found it almost impossible to imagine what kind of monster could have committed the January 12th murder. What was such a person thinking when they killed Feng? I just couldn’t understand the killer’s thoughts or motivation… But that was before I heard the tapes. They’re more than simple cassettes – they’re letters left behind by the victim.’