Li Miaomiao seemed to think of something. Tears welled in her eyes. “Brother, could Mom’s head be inside that delivery box?”
Jiang Ye had guessed the same thing, but he shook his head and said, “No. It’s more likely a trap to lure us outside.”
Jiang Ye made up his mind not to go out. Everything could wait until dawn.
The low whistle outside continued without stopping. None of the three of them could sleep anymore, so they sat in the living room wrapped in blankets. Jiang Ye felt that melody was very familiar. He must have heard it somewhere before.
He closed his eyes and forced himself to remember.
Just as a vague thought flashed through his mind like lightning, a heavy knock came from outside the door, abruptly cutting off his train of thought. He lost that important clue.
“Is Jiang Ye here?” A man’s voice came from outside the door. “I’m Zhang Yang, from the Criminal Police Detachment of the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau. Sorry to disturb you this late, but there’s a case we need you to cooperate with.”
*****
Five hours earlier, Shenzhen Public Security Branch Bureau.
Led by Zhang Yang, captain of the Criminal Investigation Detachment of the Shenzhen Public Security Branch Bureau, Shen Duo walked toward the forensic examination room. Behind him followed a long, imposing tail of people, each one wearing an immaculate suit, their expressions as grim as iron plates.
They passed through the criminal police office, drawing the attention of the officers staying up late to investigate cases.
Shen Duo looked straight ahead without glancing aside. He entered the corridor and went directly to the forensic examination room.
“The forensic results are already out.” Zhang Yang handed the documents to Shen Duo. “Apart from the neck, there are no other wounds. The murder weapon was an ax. Four days ago, an old man fishing discovered the corpse. The old man had a heart attack on the spot and is still lying in the hospital. Counting today, this child has been dead for more than a week. She was buried in the earth for at least five days.”
They entered the forensic examination room.
A rotting headless corpse lay on the morgue table. An indescribable stench filled the room. When the investigators behind Shen Duo saw the headless corpse, they looked as if they were facing a formidable enemy. Several of them even reached toward the backs of their waists.
Shen Duo had not brought a mask, so he snatched one from a subordinate and put it on, then continued speaking with Zhang Yang. “Identity of the deceased.”
“A student from First-year Class A at Yuyang High School. Her name was Liu Bei.”
“Where’s the head?”
“We still haven’t found it.”
Zhang Yang handed Liu Bei’s file to Shen Duo. Her ID photo from when she was alive was attached to it. She was a sweet-looking girl.
Shen Duo studied the photo for a moment and nodded. “It’s her, all right.”
From his expression, it was as if he had seen her before.
Curious, Zhang Yang asked, “Teacher Shen, do you know this child?”
Shen Duo smiled gently. “We’ll be taking full control of this corpse.”
He made a gesture to the subordinates behind him. “Xiao Liu, handle the handover with Brother Zhang. Seal all the materials. Bag the corpse and move it to our place.”
Once they had their orders, several investigators quickly took out a body bag and put the headless corpse inside. They also wound restraint straps tightly around it, layer after layer.
Zhang Yang found it strange. The way they were wrapping it, they were practically turning the corpse into a rice dumpling.
From how cautious they looked, it seemed as if they believed this corpse might rise from the dead.
The man in front of him, Shen Duo, wore gold-rimmed glasses and looked gentle and frail, yet he carried a forceful, iron-fisted air.
“No, this doesn’t follow procedure. You can’t take the corpse away. You people do biological research. You can only assist us in investigating the case!” Zhang Yang said.
“How many days has Liu Bei’s corpse been at your bureau?” Shen Duo asked abruptly.
“Two days,” Zhang Yang said.
“The morgue’s body freezer is locked at night, isn’t it?” Shen Duo asked again.
“Of course!” Zhang Yang said.
“Then your office has pretty good soundproofing. It’s not like my place. When the leader snores during his noon nap, I can hear it through two walls.” Shen Duo smiled.
Zhang Yang was completely lost. “Teacher Shen, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Trust me. This case isn’t something you can handle. The paperwork will come down tomorrow. Your bureau chief is still asleep. When he wakes up, someone will call him, and then he’ll immediately tell you this case must be sealed at once and all evidence transferred to us for research. The process can’t officially go through until tomorrow, but this corpse absolutely cannot stay here.”
Shen Duo paused. “Oh, right. I have a video here that was filmed two days ago. I’ll show it to you. Once you’ve seen it, you won’t argue with me anymore.”
Shen Duo took out his phone and pulled up a video for Zhang Yang.
It had been downloaded from a short-video platform. In it, a pretty food blogger was livestreaming a restaurant visit.
Zhang Yang was incorruptibly stern. “I won’t bend the rules just because you’re showing me a pretty girl. Besides, I already follow this pretty girl.”
“…” Shen Duo said, “She’s not what I wanted you to look at.”
Zhang Yang gave him a suspicious glance and continued watching the video carefully.
He recognized the street where the girl was. It was the street in front of Yuyang High School. Every time school let out or started, it became so jammed with traffic that not even water could flow through it. He suffered tremendously every day when he drove his daughter to school.
Why was Shen Duo showing him this street?
Very quickly, he discovered the answer.
The pretty girl’s selfie video happened to capture the main road. It also captured two people at the bus stop across the street.
One was a boy carrying a black canvas backpack. The boy was tall and slender, his expression indifferent, with an aloofness that kept others a thousand miles away.
The other was a girl wearing a blue-and-white school-uniform skirt, looking somewhat shy.
Zhang Yang narrowed his eyes and looked closely. Then he was horrified to discover that this girl was Liu Bei.
How was this possible?
Liu Bei was clearly already dead.
When this video was filmed, her corpse was lying in the body freezer at the forensic center.
Shen Duo adjusted his glasses and said, “You just told me Liu Bei has been dead for more than a week.”
“That’s right…” Zhang Yang was extremely dazed. He watched it again before admitting that he had indeed not seen wrong. “Could this video have been edited? AI face-swap?”
“I can send you the video. Have your technical department examine it, and you’ll know whether it’s an AI face-swap.” Shen Duo patted Zhang Yang on the shoulder. “The boy talking to Liu Bei—help me check his identity. I need to know where he is now.”
“No need to check. I know him,” Zhang Yang said. “He’s my girl’s classmate, a third-year Class B student at Yuyang High School. His name is Jiang Ye. Pretty boy doesn’t study, only thinks about puppy love. He got himself a girlfriend from another school. My girl cried all night after she found out he had a girlfriend.”
“Third-year Class B. I think I have a little friend there I haven’t met before.” Shen Duo smiled, then asked, “Has the bureau received any strange reports lately?”
“Last week, a tour group went hiking on Maluan Mountain and mysteriously disappeared. They still haven’t been found.”
Shen Duo continued asking, “Anything else? Any kind of report that sounded absurd the moment you heard it? Supernatural, unscientific, like a false police report?”
Zhang Yang shook his head. “I’ll ask the comrades at the 110 police emergency service desk for you.”
He made a phone call and said a few words, then turned back and said, “No especially unusual reports. There was just one call tonight. The call came through, but there was no sound the whole time. When they called back, it wouldn’t connect, and they couldn’t track the phone signal either.”
Shen Duo said, “Find out whose number it was.”
Zhang Yang relayed his question. After listening to the service desk’s answer, his expression turned shocked.
“It was Jiang Ye.”
*****
Now, the old apartment building.
The drowsy Li Miaomiao instantly woke up.
“The ghost is here again!”
Jiang Ye walked to the door and asked, “How do you know I’m here?”
Zhang Yang said, “Jiang Ye, four hours ago, you called the police emergency number, but you didn’t make a sound. We suspected you had been taken hostage and couldn’t report the situation. We tried to track your phone signal, but your phone was turned off the entire time. We were very worried about your safety and kept trying to call you back. Half an hour ago, your phone turned on. The signal showed you were here.”
“How do we know you’re really from the Public Security Bureau?” Li Miaomiao shouted.
Zhang Yang said, “Open the door. I’ll show you my badge.”
Li Miaomiao had learned her lesson. She whispered to Jiang Ye, “We can’t trust him. They’re trying to trick us into opening the door again.”
Another unfamiliar male voice said, “Student Jiang, this delivery package at the door has been making strange sounds. We suspect it may be a bomb planted by terrorists. Sorry, but we have to open it and inspect it.”
Without waiting for Jiang Ye’s reply, he already heard the sound of the package being unwrapped outside.
Jiang Ye opened the surveillance screen on his phone.
There were seven people in the stairwell. Only one of them was wearing a police uniform, probably the officer who had spoken earlier.
Two of them wore transparent face shields and leather gloves. These two were carefully cutting open the package. A few steps behind them stood a tall, thin man wearing gold-rimmed glasses, looking like some high-level intellectual. This man was clearly the leader of the group. The remaining three men in suits stood to his left and right in a protective posture.
They knew there was something dangerous inside the box.
But it definitely was not a bomb.
If they thought there was a bomb inside, the people dismantling it should not be them. It should be the bomb squad.
“Officer, before you arrived, something pretended to be a food delivery rider to trick us into opening the door.” Jiang Ye took a deep breath and said, “You need to give me a reason to believe you.”
Shen Duo smiled and patted Zhang Yang on the shoulder. “I’ll talk to him.”
Zhang Yang stepped aside. Shen Duo walked up to the door and said, “Student Jiang Ye, I am a biological research expert assisting the police investigation. My name is Shen Duo. I belong to the Special Biology Research Institute of Capital University, specializing in the study of special organisms.”
“Special organisms…” Jiang Ye’s brows twisted into a knot.
Shen Duo said slowly, “Let me put it this way, Jiang Ye. Do you believe there are ghosts in this world?”
“From the perspective of time, Earth has a history of four billion years, while the history we humans recognize and grasp is only a little over five thousand years. The spacetime we understand is merely the tip of the iceberg of complete spacetime. The knowledge structure we possess is a deeply flawed and incomplete system.
“For many years, people have called things that cannot be explained by their existing cognitive structures and scientific theories supernatural phenomena. They have called those unheard-of, unseen special organisms ‘ghosts.’
“These anomalous phenomena and anomalous organisms hide behind our history, coexist with us, and at the same time interfere with our normal world. The work of our Special Biology Research Institute is to study them, explain them, and eliminate them, including…”
Shen Duo said leisurely, “Headless corpses that can walk.”
Jiang Ye’s gaze froze. “You know about the headless…”
“That’s right,” Shen Duo said calmly. “I know.”
Zhang Yang said very seriously, “Young man, everything he said is true. I even bought their institute’s latest academic monograph. What was it called again?”
He lowered his head to scroll through his phone. “Oh, right. 108 Unsolved Mysteries of World History. Why did Cao Cao have double pupils? Why did the Yellow Emperor have four faces? Because they drank the blood of anomalous organisms!”
Jiang Ye: “…”
He had the distinct feeling that Shen Duo was a fraud.
“Hold on. Let me finish first,” Shen Duo continued. “At exactly five o’clock in the afternoon on November 16, a headless female corpse named Liu Bei was discovered on the riverbank north of Shahe. At 6:34 p.m. on November 18, you encountered her at the bus stop outside Yuyang High School. At 12:07 noon on November 19, traffic surveillance on Xiangshan North Road captured her being forced into a van. Since then, her whereabouts have been unknown.
“At 10:19 p.m. on November 20, I arrived at the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau. At the forensic center, I saw the headless corpse discovered on the 16th and moved it to a secret warehouse. The corpse was dissected by specialized personnel. After the dissection, we found something strange inside her body.”
Jiang Ye’s expression turned grave. “Long black hair?”
“You’re very observant.”
“Inside the body too? What exactly is it?” Jiang Ye was shocked.
Shen Duo did not answer. “Those are state secrets. I can’t tell you any more. Student Jiang, I’m telling you this because I hope you’ll trust me. I don’t have any very effective way to prove we aren’t those headless monsters. After all, those organisms seem very good at role-playing, and you and I have never met. You have no way to judge whether I’m the real Shen Duo or not.
“I can only hope that you’ll be brave enough to open the door and cooperate with our work.”
“The package is open,” an investigator called.
On the surveillance screen, the gloved investigator opened the package and lifted out something pitch-black, then held it up in front of Shen Duo.
Jiang Ye heard the whistling more clearly.
“A tape recorder?” Shen Duo examined the thing in front of him. “Pretty old. Did they get this from a secondhand market? Is the cassette stuck?”
A tape recorder?
Jiang Ye stared at the surveillance video.
Shen Duo patted the tape recorder. The whistling paused, then sure enough, it continued playing. Some people’s voices came from inside.
Before Jiang Ye could hear them clearly, Shen Duo had already turned the tape recorder off.
“Take it back.” He raised his head and said to Jiang Ye again, “Student Jiang Ye, I believe those headless ghosts and monsters do not possess my outstanding sense of humor or my sincere heart.”
This time, he spoke facing the peephole camera. He had already discovered that Jiang Ye was watching him through it.
The man named Shen Duo looked about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, dressed in a suit and leather shoes. He was handsome, and his smile was very approachable.
Li Miaomiao judged good and evil by facial attractiveness. In a low voice, she said, “He looks like a good person. Can we trust him?”
Jiang Ye silently turned around and went to the freezer to take out the woven plastic sack.
Li Miaomiao was somewhat surprised. “What are you doing!?”
Jiang Ye said to Jin Feize, “This has nothing to do with you. Thank you for your help. I’ll take responsibility for the dismemberment. Please help take care of my sister.”
Under the dim light, the two looked at each other.
Jiang Ye’s expression was calm, as cold and indifferent as always. No special emotion could be seen on his face.
He had always been like this, like a piece of frost that refused to melt. Not too cold, yet without much warmth either.
Jin Feize studied him. “Even if they investigate and find out you didn’t kill the person, dismembering a corpse can still get you convicted of insulting a corpse.”
“It’s fine. We can’t keep dragging you into this,” Jiang Ye said.
Jin Feize tilted his head and smiled. “Jiang Ye, you really are a good person.”
Jiang Ye opened the security door.
The light from the stairwell poured in like a dazzling curtain of radiance.
“Applause for the brave young man.” Smiling, Shen Duo took his ID from his pocket and showed it to Jiang Ye.
He lowered his head to look at the woven plastic sack and asked, “What’s this? A new clue you’re providing me?”
Jiang Ye handed him the woven plastic sack. Shen Duo accepted it.
Jiang Ye said calmly, “I think you came to ask me what Liu Bei said to me. She confessed to me. I rejected her. After that, she left a note in my backpack telling me not to go back to Tianlu Mansion. I didn’t take her warning seriously.
“This evening, my sister and I were attacked at Tianlu Mansion by twenty-three headless corpses, including my stepfather, Li Yi’an. We drove away and escaped, then were attacked again by a headless corpse in the trunk.
“To protect myself and my sister, I dismembered that headless corpse. It’s in this woven plastic sack now.”
Shen Duo’s smile froze on his face.
The stairwell fell silent.
Clearly, the act of dismembering a headless corpse had stunned all of them.
“My mom is missing. Please help me find her,” Jiang Ye said. “I don’t know whether dismembering a person without a head is illegal or not. I’m willing to bear all legal responsibility and cooperate with any investigation. About my mom—please.”
Shen Duo studied Jiang Ye with an unreadable expression for a couple of seconds, then said to Zhang Yang behind him, “Please check Jiang Ye’s mom—”
“Jiang Ruochu. ID number 440300197411010045,” Jiang Ye said.
“Check Jiang Ruochu’s whereabouts,” Shen Duo said.
Zhang Yang made a phone call. After a while, he received a reply.
With a complicated expression, he said, “My colleague says your mom is in your apartment.”