Skinner's Box (Fang Mu (Eastern Crimes)) (28 page)

If the killer's plan had not been to shock the community, then for whom had he set up the display?

Fang Mu twisted around so that he was sitting in the exact spot the victim's body had been left—and found himself facing the mottled windows of the storage house.

Had it been done for the benefit of some person or persons standing behind those windows?

Fang Mu stood and walked over to the storage house, peering once more through the glass at the dusky shapes that lay stacked inside. It was an ordinary school storage house; messy and filthy, full of spider webs and dust. Fang Mu was scanning the junk piled just inside the storage house door when something behind the heap of broken old desks and chairs caught his eye.

He hurried around the corner to a window that would afford a better view. Sure enough, there was a blackboard hanging on the wall behind the junk pile. Fang Mu thought a moment, and then made his way over to the main school building.

The headmaster told Fang Mu that the storage house had once been used as a classroom. When the school had first been built, it was one of only a handful of high schools in the city, and thus had been packed to the rafters with students. In order to accommodate them all, even the smallest buildings, including the one now used for storage, had been converted to house classrooms. Later, along with the construction of more high schools around the city, the number of students attending No. 11 High gradually decreased. That particular classroom had lain idle for years until it was turned into a storage house in 1999.

If Fang Mu's assumption was correct, then the killer had selected this school on purpose as a place to dump the body. And the spot between the flowerbed and the storage house could not have been chosen lightly, either. Perhaps the killer had once gone to school there, or even sat in that very same classroom that used to exist in the little building!

Fang Mu could not help but feel excitement at having made this deduction. He went ahead and requested from the headmaster a list of names of all the students who had ever attended class in the storage house. The headmaster looked rather distressed at this; in those days, there had been no computers on which to keep the enrollment records. Attendance and enrollment had been recorded on paper rosters, and finding the names of students whose homeroom had been in the little storage house that many years ago would require digging through piles and piles of binders. In the end, however, he agreed to do what he could to assist the police investigation.

Two days later, Changhong City No. 11 High School sent over more than a dozen student rosters. As Fang Mu flipped briefly through their hard-bound, yellowing pages, he did a quick mental calculation. There were thousands of names in the binders. He frowned in disappointment. But assuming the killer was probably male, he decided to ask his colleagues in the Municipal Bureau to start by looking into the males on the list who currently resided in Changhong City, with the express instructions to find out their current addresses, occupations, and so on.

Simultaneously, following Fang Mu's recommendation, the police made tentative progress toward finding the woman with type AB blood. Fang Mu felt that the handkerchief found at the crime scene was the most important piece of material evidence in the entire case and that the killer's motive was very likely sex-related. The victim had led a low-profile and introverted life, and seemed to have had little opportunity to have dealings with anyone in the sex industry. During his son Ma Guang's testimony, however, he had stated plainly that his father had once been involved with a prostitute. So was that woman that suffered from syphilis the same woman whose body fluids had been left on the handkerchief?

Fang Mu advised the Municipal Bureau to canvass the city, including every hospital and clinic, for records from the past 10 years of a woman between the ages of 25 and 35 with type AB blood who had been treated for syphilis. Their search turned up a list of 1162 names of people with syphilis symptoms who had visited a hospital or clinic in Changhong City within the past 10 years. That was a lot of people, but only 56 of them were females between the ages of 25 and 35 with type AB blood. The police continued to screen each of these 56 people, and in the end they found that 18 of them had worked in the sex industry at one time or another.

Of these 18 people, two could not be located, six had died, and the remaining 10 people were still living in the city. The police organized a photo lineup for Ma Guang to pick out which one of them had come to his house looking for money from his father. At first they did not have high hopes for success, because so many years had gone by that Ma Guang's memory was likely to be fuzzy on the matter, which could lead to a higher possibility of mistaken identity. Moreover, there was no way of knowing how many women could have fallen off the radar and thus never have been included in hospital records; it was quite possible that the woman in question had never sought treatment for her ailment. Fortunately, however, Ma Guang recognized one of the six deceased syphilis patients as being, without a doubt, the very woman who had come to his father's house.

"How can I forget the face of the woman who drove my mother into an early grave from anger?" he nearly bellowed upon making the identity.

She was Xia Lili, female, born in the town of Batai, Fenjin County, outside of Suijing City, and had finished elementary school. Her parents divorced while she was very little. When she was 10-year-old, she and her mother moved to Changhong City. According to records, her mother had always worked in the sex industry, and soon after moving, Xia Lili fell into the same line of work. According to an interview with a girl who had worked with her, when Xia Lili was 13-year-old her mother got into a dispute with a client over money and was beaten into a vegetative state. From then on Xia Lili took on as many clients as she could to make ends meet and take care of her mother, but despite her efforts her mother passed away three years later. After that, Xia Lili continued to live alone and work as a prostitute until she died at the age of 26 from tertiary syphilis.

This discovery caused much excitement at the Bureau and the Criminal Psychology Research Institute. However, each of the two teams formed a different hypothesis.

The Municipal Bureau's hypothesis was this: The killer might have contracted syphilis after having sex with Xia Lili. Because Ma Chunpei was the one who had given the disease to Xia Lili, the killer's motive had been revenge. Xia Lili was dead, however, so the killer had taken all of his rage out on Ma Chunpei. The trouble with this theory was that after a thorough medical examination, it was discovered that Ma Chunpei did not have syphilis, nor had he ever contracted the disease. Furthermore, even if the killer had murdered the man for revenge, then why had he waited until six years after Xia Lili's death to make his move? And how had he obtained that handkerchief?

Bian Ping's opinion was this: It was very possible that the killer was someone who had shared an intimate connection with Xia Lili, and who felt great sympathy for her having led such a miserable life. This man had gone on to exact revenge on a former client of hers after she was dead. Based on results from testing the body fluids left on the handkerchief, Ma Chunpei had had intercourse with Xia Lili right at the time that she was working as hard as she could to support herself and her mother; back then, the girl could not have been more than 13-year-old. And so, the killer had arranged the crime scene in such a way that it depicted a man "incapable of violating any more young girls," with the purpose of forcing Ma Chunpei to atone for his sins.

Fang Mu disagreed with both hypotheses. The Bureau's theory obviously made no sense, nor was there evidence to support it. As for Bian Ping's idea, it could explain why the killer had chosen a mannequin of a young girl for his display; but if this had been on his mind when he committed the murder, then why stop at killing Ma Chunpei? Surely he had been only one of hundreds or even thousands of men with whom Xia Lili had had intercourse. Why had homicide cases with similar MOs not cropped up over the intervening six years since her death?

But Bian Ping's train of thought regarding the notion of
atonement
did cause Fang Mu to have a bit of a brainstorm. The manner in which the killer had arranged the victim's body must have been an expression of a strong emotion of some kind, but rather than interpreting that necessarily as atonement, perhaps it would be better to say it had been done to exhibit a kind of
redemption
.

In her file there was a photograph of Xia Lili taken when she was on vacation with a friend. In it she looked about 19. Despite the heavy makeup she wore, a fresh youthfulness could still be seen in her expression. Perhaps due in part to having enjoyed an aberrant lifestyle for so long, she was not quite 160 centimeters tall. Anyone could see how petite her build must have been when she was 13. Assuming the killer had chosen a mannequin that closely resembled Xia Lili's body type, he had left a couple of messages on the body of this "little girl
"
: One was of safety (the mannequin's clothing was intact and it was even wearing underwear), and another was of beauty (nothing could convey beauty more than a little girl wearing a cute skirt). In fact, what the killer had been trying to convey was that this man had not violated, nor could he possibly violate, this "girl". So, the sentiment the killer had wanted to express was not atonement; it was
redemption
—he had wished to prove that something had
not,
in fact, occurred.

If Fang Mu's theory held water, then it went to reason that, quite possibly, the killer had not created this morbid scene as a display for others to see, but rather as something he had wanted to show himself.

And this person may have been a student who had witnessed something through those storage house windows, years ago when the place had been a classroom.

After a few days of hard work they were finally finished filtering through the pile of rosters sent over by Changhong City No. 11 High School, but through all their efforts there still remained 464 people who met the search criteria. As the police officer in charge of sifting through the papers rubbed a pair of bloodshot eyes with his knuckles, he warned Fang Mu that it would take a long time to investigate these 464 individuals one at a time. To make matters worse, he relayed, following Bian Ping's suggestion, much of the Bureau's manpower had been dedicated to tracking down anyone who might have had a close relationship with Xia Lili. He stopped there before giving voice to what he was thinking—all his effort spent on digging through those old paper rosters had been a total waste of time.

Fang Mu nodded absently while leafing through the list of names in his hand. Suddenly his eyes widened. "Is Vice Captain Zheng Lin here?"

As soon as the cop told him Zheng Lin was in his office, Fang Mu left without a word and sprinted toward the elevator.

Behind him he heard his ruffled colleague mutter: "Maybe the little bastard got carried off by a wolf when he was little."

Exhausted from a few days of working and getting virtually no sleep, Zheng Lin was just lying down for a nap on his office couch when Fang Mu rushed in asking him to allocate some police officers to investigate someone.

"Investigate who, exactly?"

Fang Mu held up the roster and pointed at a familiar name.

The name was Jiang Dexian.

CHAPTER
25
Paradise Lost

J
iang Dexian got out of the black A6 Audi, glanced around a moment, and hurried toward the Provincial Hospital inpatient department. No sooner had he slipped through the revolving door than a young man buying a magazine at a sidewalk news stand trotted after him.

On the other side of the street, inside his black jeep, Fang Mu lowered his binoculars and spoke a command into his walkie-talkie.

"Don't follow too close or you'll scare him off."

The police, under Fang Mu's supervision, had been monitoring Jiang Dexian for several days, but they had not learned very much. After being released from hospital, Jiang Dexian's life seemed to have returned to normal. Every day he drove to work, met with clients, appeared in court, and occasionally took walks with his wife and daughter in the little park across the street from his law firm. It seemed to be a portrait of happiness and routine. In view of the fact that they had insufficient evidence, and because their target was an expert in legal matters, the police had decided not to bring Jiang Dexian in for questioning for the time being. Instead, they had continued keeping him under surveillance, watching his every movement closely, in the hopes that they might find some hard evidence of wrongdoing.

Half an hour later, Jiang Dexian suddenly walked out of the outpatient building. His footsteps were hurried although he seemed to be keeping a calm composure. Through his binoculars, Fang Mu could see that the lawyer was throwing furtive glances in all directions as he walked. A moment later he got in his car, started the engine, and sped off.

A team of undercover cops in a white Sonata quietly pulled away from the curb and followed him.

The cop in charge of following him on foot waited until Jiang Dexian's vehicle had disappeared around a corner before jogging across the street and climbing into the backseat of Fang Mu’s jeep.

Fang Mu glanced to Zheng Lin as he twisted around to face the cop in the backseat. "What's the word?"

"I'm not sure," the cop said, a bit out of breath. "The guy bumped into a couple of people in the lobby of the inpatient building while he was waiting for the elevator. It looked like he knew them, but it had to be a chance encounter, because they all looked really surprised to see each other. They exchanged a few words, but I was too far away to hear what was said. Then Jiang Dexian left the inpatient department, and I followed him down the hall to the outpatient department. He took a number at the neurology department, and after the doctor saw him he went to the pharmacy, filled a prescription, and left."

Zheng Lin rubbed his chin in thought. "Fang Mu, do you think the guy's spotted us?"

"It's possible."

Jiang Dexian's visit to the outpatient department appeared to have been done on the spur of the moment. When he took a number at the front desk of the neurology department, he had probably said he had a headache; that would have been the simplest reason to see a doctor, but also the most difficult to verify. His actions seemed to indicate that he was trying to deceive someone. At first he had gone directly to the inpatient department; surely this meant he had been there to visit someone. So why had he suddenly changed his mind and hurried over to the outpatient department?

Was it because of his encounter with those two people in the lobby?

Zheng Lin glanced to the cop in the backseat. "What did those two people look like?"

"They were young; a man and a woman," the cop said. "She was pretty hot, and he was, uh, maybe about as tall as me. Their clothes were fashionable, and it looked like they had dyed hair, too... Hey! Hey!" He pointed out the window. "That's them right there!"

A young man and woman hurried out of the inpatient building doors, got straight into a waiting taxi, and raced off down the street.

Fang Mu and Zheng Lin exchanged a look. Neither of them could contain his excitement. They knew one of them.

The young man had been Tan Ji.

"Hey, buddy, I'm gonna have to ask you to do me another favor," Fang Mu said to the foot cop in the backseat as he watched Tan Ji's taxi disappear in traffic. "Go in there and find out what illness Jiang Dexian reported and what medicine he was prescribed."

The cop gave him a cheerful, "Yes, sir," and hopped out of the vehicle. He trotted across the street to the outpatient building.

"Let's go find out whom in the hospital he might have been visiting," Fang Mu said to Zheng Lin. "Who knows? We might see another familiar face."

After leaving the hospital Jiang Dexian had gone straight back to the law firm and worked in his office until closing time. After that he had headed straight home, where he stayed. He had neither come out nor had any visitors that night.

As for the symptoms he had reported at the hospital, sure enough, he had said he had a headache. He had also told the doctor that lately he had been having trouble sleeping, and the medicine he had gotten at the pharmacy had been a simple sedative.

Fang Mu and Zheng Lin had not turned up much on their end. Because Jiang Dexian had been planning on taking the elevator, they had decided to start their search on the third floor. They had pored over the register at every nursing station and checked the wards one by one, but had seen no one who looked suspicious or familiar. The only odd thing they had learned was that that very same day a patient had gone missing. This fact aroused Fang Mu's and Zheng Lin's interest to a new level.

The patient's name was Li Ming; he had been taken to hospital the night before for a skull fracture and a cut from a sharp object in his left forearm that had caused both nerve and tendon damage. He had also suffered from a slight concussion. The doctor told them the patient had been male, 35-year-old, between 175 and 180 centimeters tall, and of average appearance, without any obvious distinguishing characteristics. But the patient had left an impression on the doctor, because when he checked in he had seemed quite emotionally unstable. Based on that, as well as the position of his head injury – the right side of his skull – and the angle of the injury on his left forearm, the doctor suspected the patient had caused the wounds himself.

The hospital staff’s explanation for Li Ming's sudden disappearance was that he had probably not been able to afford his medical bill; he had still owed an arrearage of more than 3,000 yuan. The police checked the address that Li Ming had registered with, but found no one there by that name; apparently the patient had used a false name.

Though they had been unable to track this person down, at the very least the investigation had led to a possible line of reasoning: This so-called Li Ming might know Jiang Dexian and Tan Ji, and he had been the person those two had been planning to visit when they happened to bump into each other. If this were true, then they must have some hidden secret between them that was important enough that both of them had abandoned their plans to visit the patient, and this "Li Ming" had checked himself out of the hospital without a moment's notice.

There are only four people at the meeting this time: Miss Q, Mr. T, Luo Jiahai, and Mr. Z.

Mr. Z has a solemn look about him; he is chain-smoking and darkly sipping tea. Mr. T's mood seems cold as well; hugging his shoulders, he sits still without saying a word.

Miss Q lowers her head and plays with the hem of her sleeve, occasionally glancing from Mr. T to Mr. Z. Luo Jiahai stands away from them, parting the window curtains with his hand and staring outside.

"I remember I said very clearly..." Mr. Z says, finally breaking the silence with a stern tone, "that we are not to have any contact with each other outside of our meetings. The tiniest slip-up could ruin everything."

"I'm sorry," Miss Q says. Seeing that Mr. T is about to retort, she quickly adds, "It'll never happen again."

"Now Mr. H has no choice but to recuperate in his home." Mr. Z seems to be getting angrier and angrier. "And Mr. J won't be able to take part in our plans for a while. This is all the result of you—"

"We what?!" Mr. T says, unable to contain himself. "Q and I care about Mr. H a
lot,
and so does J. With H hurt so bad, was it wrong to be concerned about our friend?" he demands in a fiery tone.

"
Friend?
" Mr. Z sneers. "We are nothing to each other but partners, here to help one another!"

"Just partners?" Mr. T stands in agitation. "From the moment we learned about Skinner's Box, our fates have been inextricably entwined. If it weren't for that, there's no way we would've taken such a big risk to rescue Luo Jiahai!"

"Z, at the time even you agreed to save L. In fact, you said you were our friend, through thick and thin," Miss Q says, her voice low and gentle. "We're all the same. We belong together, don't we?"

Mr. Z hangs his head in silence. After a long moment, he turns to look at Luo Jiahai where he is still standing next to the window. Luo Jiahai continues stoically staring out the window, as if he has not heard a word.

"Well, everyone needs to be more careful from now on, in
everything,
" Mr. Z hisses. "Not only do we need to complete our plans and save ourselves, we need to protect ourselves, too." He sighs. "Actually, I was very displeased with our last operation; the location Mr. J chose was too risky."

"As long as he thinks it was a good place, that's all that matters. Saving oneself is much more important than killing those bastards." Mr. T's tone softens. "Don't worry; we've done it this many times without any problems, haven't we?"

Mr. Z smiles and waves his hands in the air. "Okay, okay, meeting's adjourned. Everyone be careful to leave one by one. T, you go first this time."

After Mr. T leaves, Mr. Z looks at Luo Jiahai and says, "L, I need to talk to you about something."

Still standing at the window like a statue, Luo Jiahai finally turns his head. "Yeah?"

Mr. Z motions for Luo Jiahai to sit in the chair across from him. "The original plan was to take care of your thing first so that you could leave the city as soon as possible. But now Mr. H is in a pretty bad way. Would you mind if yours got pushed back a bit?"

"Not at all," Luo Jiahai replies curtly.

"Thank you for understanding," Mr. Z says, smiling amicably and leaning forward to clap Luo Jiahai on the shoulder. For a second Luo Jiahai seems about to dodge Mr. Z's hand out of something akin to instinct, but then he braces himself, straight-backed and holding his cup of tea in both hands.

Miss Q glances at her watch. "Who should go next? Me or L? Or you?"

"You go ahead," Mr. Z says. "I'll take L back in a little bit."

Miss Q nods and is about to get up to go when Mr. Z says, "Q, there's something I've been meaning to ask you."

"Oh?" Miss Q says, a tense look on her face. "What's that?"

Mr. Z seems in no hurry to ask his question. He studies Miss Q's face for a while, until it flushes red with awkwardness.

"Q, are you and T together?"

Fang Mu hung up the phone, asked Bian Ping for the rest of the day off, and drove over to Angel Hall.

It was rare that Teacher Zhou called him on the telephone. The fact that he had called him at work this time made Fang Mu think something big had happened.

As he turned onto the little street in front of Angel Hall, he noticed several limousines parked along the curb. A crowd of local residents were gathered around a group of well-dressed fat men and some men wearing crew cuts, leather jackets, and black slacks. It looked like there was a dispute of some sort going on. Fang Mu was in no mood to find out what it was, so he whizzed past the crowd and drove to the entrance to Angel Hall.