Skinner's Box (Fang Mu (Eastern Crimes)) (42 page)

"Huh?" His mother stopped what she was doing and turned to gape at him. "What ever do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing." Fang Mu suddenly felt an irrational wave of guilt. He was turning to slip away when his mother grabbed his arm with a wet hand and forced him to look at her. There was a hint of a smile in her eyes.

"You've got a girlfriend, don't you? Tell me all about her!"

"No, Mom, I don't, I don't."

"Tell me about her right this instant." His mother was still holding his arm, not letting go. "Or bring her home so your mother can see for herself."

Fang Mu was still trying to break away from his mother's attentions when a ringing sounded from the living room, followed by his father's baritone cry over the television’s sound. "Little Mu, your phone's ringing."

Fang Mu used the opportunity to extricate himself from his mother's grip and hurry into the living room. He picked up his cell phone and saw a number he did not recognize on the display screen.

"Hello?" he said, answering it.

At first he heard nothing but a faint static through the receiver. He said "Hello" a couple more time, but no one replied. Guessing that it was yet another automated telemarketing call, Fang Mu was about to end the call when he heard a familiar voice.

"Officer Fang. It's Luo Jiahai." 

Mr. Z parked his car in the lot. As he picked up his briefcase to get out he noticed it felt lighter than usual. A chill shot down his spine. Quickly he opened the briefcase and glanced through it. Not finding what he was looking for, he upturned the briefcase and dumped its contents out on the passenger seat. A few seconds later his face went as white as a piece of paper.

He sat stunned for a while. Then he thought of something, got out his cell phone, and dialed Luo Jiahai's number. It was busy.

"Fuck!" He slammed the car door, started the engine, and took the car speeding out of the parking lot.

Fang Mu's mind was a blank. He waved at his father to turn the television volume down and spoke in the calmest voice he could muster. "Where are you?"

"I can't tell you that right now. I've called to tell you something." There was hesitation in Luo Jiahai's voice, as if he was not quite sure he had made the right choice by calling.

"About the Skinner's Box?"

"You know about that?" Luo Jiahai almost yelped. "How...how could you know about that?"

"How I know is not important. First tell me everything you know about it."

"All right, fine. There's no one else I can trust right now anyways." Luo Jiahai seemed to have made up his mind. "I guess you know about how I busted out of jail. Actually, it was my attorney Mr. Jiang who organized it. After I was free I hid out in a motel room for a while, and then a man named Mr. T got me to join his group."

"Who is Mr. T?"

"His name is Tan Ji, one of the group members. There are five of them besides me—Mr. Z, Mr. J, Mr. H, Miss Q, and Tan Ji."

"What are their real names?" Fang Mu's heart was beating so hard he felt as if it would leap out of his chest. "Tell me, one by one."

"I have a piece of paper in my hand, and from the notes on it, it looks like Mr. H's name is Huang Runhua, and Miss Q's name is Qu Rui. Oh, and Mr. J is Attorney Jiang."

"And Mr. Z?" Fang Mu asked impatiently. "What's Mr. Z's real name?"

"That's the reason I'm calling you." Luo Jiahai's tone was full of suspicion. "The folder I have contains no record of anything to do with Mr. Z."

"Damn!" Fang Mu blurted in frustration. "Okay, go on."

"Mr. Z is the one who created the group. According to him, he was one of the guinea pigs in the Indoctrination Field experiment, what he sometimes refers to as a Skinner's Box. He said he got his hands on the data and notes from the experiment by total accident, and after he read through it he got in touch with the other guinea pigs who had been made to suffer and recruited them to his group."

"And then?"

"These test subjects all had severe emotional disorders, just like Shen Xiang. It seems like Mr. Z is an expert in psychology, because he led us all in these rehearsals of a kind of stage play, only without the stage. And after we did it a few times everyone felt better."

Psychodramas. The test subjects appeared to all be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. "What did your group do besides act out these plays?"

"We... At the end of each play, we killed the volunteer who had hurt the particular group member in the past, when he or she was a test subject. The whole reason they busted me out of the detention center was to help me avenge Shen Xiang's death. After Mr. T killed his volunteer, he dumped the body in a labyrinth. We stuffed the volunteer who had hurt Miss Q into a giant teddy bear and hung him in a department store at the mall, but the one who did the actual killing that time was T as well. We left the body of the volunteer who had harmed Mr. J on his old school campus. As for Mr. H, our plan was to leave that volunteer's body in the hospital, but I suppose you know what happened after that." Luo Jiahai hesitated. "...And I took part in of some of those operations personally."

"How do you get in touch with each other?" Fang Mu asked, scribbling notes down as fast as he could. "Where did you do the actual killing?"

"We set up a special hotline to call each other on, and after each call we disposed of our phone's SIM card and got a new one. As for where we killed them, we did it in a little diner on a rural highway outside of the city, up on the second floor. It's a place Mr. H bought last year."

"Luo Jiahai," Fang Mu said, trying to compose himself. "Why are you telling me all this?"

The line went silent but for the faint static. After a long time, Luo Jiahai answered in a quiet voice. "I feel like it's… Something doesn't feel right. It's like Mr. Z used me and the others, maybe."

"Yeah?"

"Today he had me go kill the one who raped Shen Xiang, but when I saw the guy he said was her volunteer, I knew he couldn't possibly have been the one who raped her, because he was incapable of it. His, uh, he didn't have a penis. So when I got back I stole this binder from Mr. Z's briefcase, and it has all sorts of notes and data on all of us, but there's nothing on him. I thought to myself, he never
was
one of the test subjects after all; he's just been
using
us."

"What was the name of the person he sent you to kill?"

"An old man named Zhou Zhenbang."

"What?" Fang Mu cried out. "Tell me quick, what does this Mr. Z look like?"

He heard the sound of water being gulped down on the other end of the phone.

"He's in his thirties, I guess. He's got an educated look about him… Oh, my god…" Luo Jiahai suddenly began to groan.

Fang Mu was frantic. "What's the matter? Luo Jiahai, what's wrong? Hello? Hello...?" 

On the second floor of the roadside diner, Luo Jiahai's convulsing body was leaning against the edge of the table, a bitter almond-like taste shooting through his mouth in waves. He struggled to lift the bottle of mineral water to get a better look, then gave up and stared at the plastic bag near his face on the table. A moment later, his strength left him completely and he slid to the floor with a crash.

The cell phone fell from his hand and snapped closed as it hit the carpet.

Just then the door downstairs opened. A few seconds later, Mr. Z came cautiously climbing up the stairs, out of breath. Peering around the corner, he saw Luo Jiahai lying on the floor. When he spotted the bottle of mineral water near his hand, he laughed softly.

He picked up the cell phone from the carpet, checked the call log, and glanced at his watch. Cursing under his breath, he turned and hurried downstairs. When he came back up, he was carrying a large plastic bucket.

As he splashed the bucket's reddish liquid around every corner of the room, the entire second floor was filled with the overpowering odor of gasoline. Glancing at the open binder on the table, he pulled out a piece of paper from it and then tossed the binder on top of Luo Jiahai's corpse.

After saturating Luo Jiahai's body with gasoline, Mr. Z walked backwards out the door and down the stairs, pouring a trail of the pungent liquid as he went. When he reached the bottom of the stairs the bucket was just about empty. Mr. Z tossed it aside, opened the front door of the diner, took out a lighter, and lit the piece of paper he had taken from the binder. It was a color printout of a photo of Shen Xiang. As the flames slowly engulfed the picture, the girl's pretty, delicate face curled and became distorted.

With a flick of his wrist, Mr. Z tossed the burning photo toward the puddle of gasoline.

As soon as the line went dead, Fang Mu immediately contacted the technical surveillance division to triangulate the position of Luo Jiahai's phone and they were soon able to narrow it down to an approximate location. Fang Mu made another call to task force headquarters to send some officers there immediately while he grabbed his coat. Waving goodbye to his perplexed mother, he ran downstairs, got in his jeep, and drove off, sirens blaring in the night.

Based on the information provided by the technical surveillance division, Luo Jiahai's location was somewhere around the 15 kilometer marker on a highway leading west from the Beltway's southernmost exit. As Fang Mu raced south as fast as he could, he tried repeatedly to call Luo Jiahai's phone. At first it kept ringing out, but after a while his calls were unable to connect. Grinding his teeth together so hard they squeaked, he gunned the engine and shot around the cars in front of him.

Something must have happened to Luo Jiahai
, he thought to himself.
Was he still alive?

The sense of foreboding in his gut soon turned into certainty. As he passed the 13 kilometer marker, the darkness of the road ahead was lit up by what appeared to be the glow from a blazing conflagration. Fang Mu's heart sank as he sped along the road and the flames became visible.

He arrived at a little two-story roadside building. Through the roiling clouds of black smoke, he could still barely make out the word "Diner" on one wall. As Fang Mu opened the door to get out of the vehicle, a powerful gust of hot air billowed into his face. He took off his jacket, covered his head with it, and tried to get a little closer to the fire.

The entire two-story building was already completely engulfed in a roiling inferno. The hungry tongues of flame lashed through the windows from the inside and everywhere they touched was left black and smoking. The window panes that still remained intact quickly exploded from the intense heat, sending sharp, whip-like cracking noises through the night air. Fang Mu's lungs and throat were burning from breathing the hot, dry air and he felt his eyebrows singeing.

"Luo Jiahai...!" His shouts were drowned out by the roaring inferno. He ran back to the road, gathered a few handfuls of slush and snow and packed them on top of his coat. He uprooted a shrub and holding it in front of him to shield himself from the heat, stooped over and made his way step by step toward the door of the burning building.

He had just taken a few steps when someone grabbed him by the elbow and yanked him backward. It was Bian Ping. He had one hand gripped vice-like around Fang Mu's arm and the other hand raised in front of his eyes and forehead to ward off the hot air.

"
What the hell are you trying to do?" Bian Ping yelled over the bellow of fire. "Kill yourself?"

"Luo Jiahai's in there...!" Fang Mu struggled to break free, his eyes burning. "And he might have some crucial evidence with him...!"

With a strength that surprised Fang Mu, Bian Ping threw him to the ground. Fang Mu tried to climb to his feet, but Bian Ping shoved him back down with his foot.