Skinner's Box (Fang Mu (Eastern Crimes))

by Lei Mi

  Mr. H suddenly buries his face in his blue-veined hands, his entire body trembling.

  "My life was never the same again after that day. I tried as hard as I could to remember Chen Bing's face, but it just wouldn't come to me. I'd lost all my photos and yearbooks from middle school a long time ago, so I got in touch with a classmate from back then and he helped me find a picture of her in his middle school graduation photos. Back then in year three of middle school she was skinny and introverted; I didn't remember her at all. But from that day on I kept seeing that face from the photo of her in my mind, and in my dreams. I never saw her corpse, but the whole scene of her jumping from the building to her death kept playing through my mind as if I'd seen it happen with my own eyes. I saw her sitting on the windowsill, sobbing as she held onto the window frame, mouthing my name quietly, and then letting go, falling down and down and down…"

  Mr. H abruptly stops talking, jumps to his feet, grabs the tray on the table in front of him with both his hands, and smashes his head with it. Teapot and teacups clatter to the floor all around him, and his upper body is drenched in steaming hot liquid.

  The others rush forward to restrain Mr. H. The blood has drained from his face and his jaws are clenched tightly. He seems about to pass out from shock. Mr. Z signals for everyone to help Mr. H over to the corner of the room, where they get him to stretch out on the rug there, pry open his mouth, and force him to swallow a couple of sedatives. The semi-conscious Mr. H twitches violently a while longer, mumbling something incomprehensible from time to time, and then his muscles gradually relax as he falls into a deep sleep.

  His words hung in the air.

  After everyone returned to the table and had taken a seat, Mr. Z prepared a new pot of tea, hesitated a moment, then said, "I guess I'll go ahead and continue telling Mr. H's story for him."

  No one objected, so Mr. Z cleared his throat and continued. "Chen Bing's suicide kept playing over and over in Mr. H's mind, and each time was more painful than the last. He agreed with what her husband had said, that her death was all H's fault. This intense feeling of guilt had already begun to hamper his ability to function normally at work and in his everyday life. He hated himself from the bottom of his heart, and came to believe that the only way to atone for Chen Bing's death would be to destroy himself. And so Mr. H went to the hospital and demanded to be allowed to donate his organs. The doctor, seeing that Mr. H was in an unstable state and suspecting that he suffered from a mental disorder, refused. After several more such failed attempts, Mr. H's disgust with himself grew deeper and deeper until late one night he got up, went into his bathroom, and cut himself with a razor. A little while later his wife found him. The wounds were not serious enough to go to the hospital. She asked him what was wrong, but he, unable to explain, lost his temper, and began screaming and howling at her. Afraid and not understanding what had made her husband act this way, H's wife left to go stay at her mother's place for a while."

  "So, that girl Chen Bing," Miss Q asked, "did she really kill herself because of H?"

  "No." Mr. Z laughed a bit and flipped through the folder in his hands. "This thing was no different from what each one of us has encountered; it was all just an experiment that had been planned a very long time in advance. According to what information I've been able to gather, there was indeed a woman named Chen Bing, and she and Chen Bing had indeed attended middle school together. But five years ago she fell into a profound depression, so bad that she tried several times to commit suicide. I believe the mastermind behind Skinner's Box had looked into Chen Bing's medical history and known that sooner or later she would succeed in killing herself. So he targeted Mr. H to be his guinea pig and waited for her to do it."

  "Then how do you explain those letters and diaries?" Mr. T asked.

  Mr. Z laughed again. "They were forged, of course. And as far as I know, there was never even a shred of truth to Chen Bing's so-called secret love for Mr. H."

  "So if they were all forged, then why did Chen Bing's hubby go along with it?" Miss Q asked.

  "That part was bogus, too." Mr. Z chuckled as he retrieved a photograph from his folder. "He was what you might call an unwitting participant in our friend's Skinner's Box. The guy was just playing a part. The mastermind judged that Mr. H would not bother verifying whether or not the letters and diaries were real, so he felt he had nothing to fear."

  The atmosphere grew heavy as everyone stared at the photograph.

  "Mr. H's condition is worsening," Mr. Z lamented. "Q and T both saw it for themselves: Mr. H is beginning to self-harm."

  "But why would he do that?"

  Mr. Z's eyes turned to Luo Jiahai. "During our operation to break L out of jail, Mr. H helped Mr. J engineer a massive automobile accident, as you all know. Well, when he witnessed the carnage caused by the accident, it inadvertently exacerbated his feelings of guilt. That of course is one of the most common signs of PTSD. So," Mr. Z said, addressing Luo Jiahai. "First we'll help Mr. H. Is that all right with you?"

  Luo Jiahai shot a glance at Mr. H where he was still sleeping soundly in the corner, and shook his head. "It's fine."

  CHAPTER

  28

  Experiment

  Under Fang Mu's recommendation, the Municipal Bureau decided to merge the labyrinth homicide, the Fushima Mall homicide, and the Changhong City No. 11 High School homicide all into one case, and to form a special task force responsible for investigating it. It was to be led by Zheng Lin, and he chose both Fang Mu and Bian Ping to be the task force's principal members.

  The decision had been made in large part due to a discovery made while a certain cocky investigator was showing off.

  He had been working too much overtime—so much that his girlfriend, tired of feeling snubbed, had come directly to the precinct to find him. In an effort to deflect her anger and cheer her up, he had given her a demonstration of how a DNA comparison test works. Using a hair from inside the giant teddy bear as a sample, he randomly picked a dataset from the database to compare it to. All he had wanted to do was show his girlfriend what an inconclusive comparison result would look like, but to his surprise, the test came up a 99.99% positive match!

  He quickly pulled up the dataset he had used and discovered it belonged to none other than Luo Jiahai. Luo Jiahai's list of criminal charges had included rape, so a sample of his blood had been taken in order to compare his DNA with DNA from semen found inside the victim's vagina. So, to everyone's great surprise, the sample turned out to be helpful long after Luo Jiahai's escape.

  Being able to definitively link the three homicides into one case was a major breakthrough. As far as Fang Mu was concerned, on the one hand it confirmed that his theory had been correct, while on the other hand this step was merely the beginning. What Bian Ping had said was true; Fang Mu was indeed quite adept at studying a series of murders and deducing nuances in a killer's psychological state, and from those nuances he was able to draw a remarkably accurate picture of the killer's physical characteristics, professional background, and so on. But these three cases were nowhere near that simple.

  Clues in serial murder cases were often found because of the fact that many serial killers liked to leave behind a mark or a symbol of some sort to be found with their victims' bodies. Such marks often served as behavior indicators, which in turn provided the police with a more accurate portrayal of the killer's personality traits. Typically, this marking behavior was not an essential component of the killer's crime; however, if the killer did leave a mark, it meant he (or she) wanted to satisfy some specific psychological or emotional need. But the marks and symbols left in the three homicides were just plain bizarre.

  The three murders had some obvious things in common: each homicide had involved multiple persons; each had utilized a motor vehicle; each primary crime scene had been at a separate location from its dump site; each secondary crime scene had had a strong ritualistic feel to it. On this last point especially, Fang Mu had based his insistence that the three m
urders must be linked somehow. But the emotions expressed in each of the three crime scenes had been completely different. In the labyrinth murder, the ritual seemed to symbolize vengeance; in the Fushima Mall murder it seemed to symbolize validation; in the No. 11 High School murder it seemed to symbolize redemption. He did not think it likely that all three such complex emotions had originated in the same person. And so, going on the hypothesis that more than one person had been involved in each crime, Fang Mu came up with a bold assumption: each of the three murders had very possibly been committed on three separate occasions by the same group of people.

  "You mean..."Bian Ping frowned as he listened. "…Like an organization of murderers, helping each other kill?"

  "I believe it's possible."

  "Why would they band together? What would be their motive for doing so?"

  "That part I can't figure out." Fang Mu sat down across from Bian Ping. "So we'll need everyone's help on it."

  Based on the evidence at hand, the three homicide victims had obviously not been selected at random; each had some connection with one of the suspects. And so Bian Ping formulated a bizarre chart and drew it on the office white board: Jiang Peiyao—Tan Ji; Shen Baoqiang—Luo Jiahai; Ma Chunpei—Jiang Dexian.

  "So we might as well go at it from the opposite direction,” Bian Ping said, “and look to see if there's any sort of connection between Jiang Peiyao, Shen Baoqiang, and Ma Chunpei. If we find anything, it could help us understand the relationship between Tan Ji, Luo Jiahai, and Jiang Dexian."

  Fang Mu thought Bian Ping's suggestion made a lot of sense, but he proposed a different view. He believed there was no corresponding connection between Luo Jiahai and Shen Baoqiang. If Luo Jiahai had wanted to kill anybody else, it would certainly have been whoever had been responsible for ruining Shen Xiang's life. Nothing about the Fushima Mall murder, however, seemed to indicate that it had been done to avenge a victim of sexual assault. Furthermore, none of the testimony from the Shen Xiang case had made mention of anything to do with a teddy bear or the mall. However, this led Fang Mu to consider another possibility: if Luo Jiahai had merely been a participant in these murders, it indicated that an as yet unknown person had been the killer who corresponded to Shen Baoqiang's death.

  And that meant there could be four people in this organization of mutually assisting murders, or even more.

  "That's possible, too." Bian Ping hung his head, deep in thought. "Do you remember that video from the Fushima Mall case, the surveillance footage? I bet there were at least four people hiding under that sheet."

  Logic dictated an even more alarming possibility, and the grim reality of it was staring them both in the face: If there was indeed more than three people in this twisted organization, then the killings might not be over.

  The task force set out exploring any possible connections between the three victims. At the same time, in light of the fact that the suspects might already be aware that the police had them in their sights, it was decided that they would not be investigated directly for the time being, although calls to and from their cell phones and other communications would still be monitored as unobtrusively as possible. Fang Mu's assignment was to continue analyzing the evidence for all three homicides and to make every effort to gather further clues. The walls of his office were plastered with photographs and documents. In the dead center was a picture of Luo Jiahai.

  Luo Jiahai was a key figure linking the three murders together, and there were still a lot of leads worth following that had to do with him.

  One: Luo Jiahai was still hiding out somewhere in the city. The dragnet drawn by the Changhong City police was not nearly as airtight as it had been, and now, with the end of the year fast approaching, the bus stations, train stations, and airports were thronged with tourists, making it the perfect time to make a getaway. The fact that he had not left meant he obviously had another purpose for staying. If Fang Mu's assumptions were correct, Luo Jiahai was a man with a strong sense of retribution, so his reason for staying could be to avenge Shen Xiang.

  Two: The fact that Luo Jiahai had been able to remain in Changhong City for so long without being discovered upped the probability considerably that someone out there was aiding and abetting him. If this was the case, one had to wonder whether Luo Jiahai's jailbreak had been the result of a meticulously thought out plan. Jiang Dexian could well have been the one to engineer it, or at the very least be one of the conspirators. The truck driver that had initiated that massive automobile accident, Huang Runhua, could even be in with them. Jiang Dexian had fought for the opportunity to become Luo Jiahai's defense attorney, and had done everything in his power to keep him from getting the death penalty. After he failed in this, he had risked everything to break Luo Jiahai out of jail; he must have had an extremely important reason for doing this. Perhaps he had done it so that Luo Jiahai could take part in killing Shen Baoqiang. More likely, Jiang Dexian had done it so that he could form his organization of mutually assisting murders.

  A colleague in the Household Registration Division at the Municipal Bureau sent over a photograph, which Fang Mu pinned right next to Luo Jiahai's. It was of a pretty, slightly shy-looking girl—Shen Xiang.

  Considering the developments in the case so far, it was possible that Shen Xiang was a key figure in all of this. This poor girl, psychologically traumatized by a sexual assault that had been etched forever in her young mind, had found a short-lived consolation in love. But in the end her pain was exposed for all to see, and at the height of her despair she and Luo Jiahai had murdered the person who had leaked her long-hidden secret. With her boyfriend behind bars, Shen Xiang had felt no choice but to cut her ties to the mortal coil with a razor-sharp blade.

  As Fang Mu mulled this over, he had a sudden flash of insight. If Luo Jiahai had joined the group of murderers in order to avenge Shen Xiang, then the one with the initial connection to its members might not have been Luo Jiahai, but rather Shen Xiang.

  Fang Mu grew excited over this new train of thought. He picked up the phone, thinking he would go to the Bureau and check out the case's evidence boxes, but no sooner had he dialed the first two digits than he stopped and hung up. Shen Xiang's rape had never been reported to the police, he remembered. Everything they knew about it had come from Luo Jiahai's testimony.

  Fang Mu got out a pen and paper and began jotting down everything he could remember that Luo Jiahai had told him, from beginning to end. The page was soon crammed to the margins with scribbled words and phrases. As Fang Mu scanned through what he had written, two items leaped out at him. He circled them.

  According to Luo Jiahai's testimony, the rapist had told Shen Xiang, "I've left my stuff inside you, and you'll carry the smell of it for the rest of your life." Although this information had been relayed by Luo Jiahai, Fang Mu had no doubt as to its veracity, because it would have been an unforgettable experience for Shen Xiang, to say the least; every detail of the encounter would have been etched into her memory.

  But there was something strange about what the rapist had allegedly said.

  He had it. The line seemed too deliberate, too contrived; it was as if the words had been prepared and rehearsed in advance. It seemed strange indeed for such words to come out of a rapist's mouth. If they were a true reflection of the offender's abnormal psychology, then other similar cases would surely have cropped up over time.

  Fang Mu did a quick calculation, and then put in a request to the Municipal Bureau for information on all the rape cases they had on file from the past 10 years. He spent half the day in his office poring over the resulting dossiers, but found no cases that seemed similar to Shen Xiang's. This led him to believe it was not very likely that the culprit had suffered from an abnormal psychology in the classic sense. Bearing that assumption in mind, suppose the rapist had said what he said deliberately, in order to provoke a reaction of some sort. If that were the case, then the words sounded more like a suggestion; perhaps the rapist had wanted Shen Xiang to develop an intense
reaction to the idea of smell.

  The other item Fang Mu had circled on his page of notes was Luo Jiahai's statement that every time Shen Xiang took a shower or went out shopping, she always felt as if she were being watched or followed. If Shen Xiang had developed paranoid schizophrenia as a result of trauma caused by the sexual assault perpetrated on her at a young age, the statement would not seem out of place to Fang Mu at all; a feeling that someone was following her could simply have been a delusion or even a fantasy of Shen Xiang's. But the fact that there was no record of any other psychotic symptoms in her, combined with the supposition that her rapist had deliberately contrived to evoke an emotional reaction in her against smell, had Fang Mu wondering if, maybe, she had not been imagining things when she sensed that someone was watching her. In other words, perhaps someone really had been following her, and that person's purpose in doing so had been to observe and record the various extreme reactions Shen Xiang had.