5:20 AM.
A strange smell permeated the hallway of the old residential building.
Cleaner Auntie Liu carried her mop up to the fifth floor.
She yawned, then stepped on something sticky.
She looked down.
There was a large, dark red stain on the floor.
It stretched from the end of the hallway to the stairwell, as if someone had dragged a wet sack across it.
Auntie Liu followed the trail and looked deep into the hallway.
The security door of 502 was gone.
It wasn’t just open; the entire door and frame had vanished.
All that remained was a pitch-black gap, with broken bricks scattered on the floor, revealing the grey concrete inside.
Several wooden splinters were scattered on the ground at the entrance.
It looked as if it had been blasted apart from the inside by some immense force.
Auntie Liu’s mop dropped to the floor.
Her mouth fell open, and it took several seconds before she let out a shrill scream.
Twenty minutes later, three police cars pulled up downstairs.
Three layers of yellow and white caution tape were strung up, cordoning off the entire building.
Uniformed officers maintained order downstairs.
Several plainclothes detectives had already gone up to the fifth floor.
Vansin stood at the entrance of 502, wearing gloves.
He crouched down to examine the marks on the floor.
He was fifty-two years old and had spent thirty years in criminal investigation.
He had worked his way up from a beat cop to the deputy captain of the municipal criminal investigation detachment; there wasn’t a crime scene he hadn’t seen.
But this one today felt wrong.
“Captain Van, the coroner has had a preliminary look.”
The young detective behind him, Leon, handed over a handwritten preliminary examination report.
Vansin took it and scanned it, his brows knitting together.
“Two bodies?”
“Yes, a man and a woman, the householders, Phillips and his wife, Keira.”
Leon’s face was a bit pale.
“There are five parallel wounds on their necks. The coroner says they look like they were caused by some kind of sharp object, but the spacing of the wounds is uniform, unlike a knife.”
“What kind of sharp object could leave marks like that?”
Vansin stood up and walked into the room.
The scene in the living room made him stop in his tracks.
The two bodies had already been covered with white sheets.
But the dark liquid seeping from beneath the sheets continued to spread along the gaps in the floor tiles.
There were blood splatters on the wall, and an overturned teacup and remote control were scattered across the floor from the TV cabinet.
“Captain Van, take a look at this.”
The coroner, Old Sun, crouched beside the male victim and lifted a corner of the white sheet, revealing the wound on the neck.
Five neat lacerations extended from the left carotid artery to the right collarbone.
The edges of the wounds were irregular, showing signs of severe tearing.
“It’s not a knife,” Vansin said.
“Correct, not a knife.”
Old Sun’s voice was dry.
“The shape of the wounds is closer to animal claw marks, but I’ve been a coroner for over twenty years and I’ve never seen any animal capable of causing claw wounds of this depth.”
He gestured with his hand.
“The deepest part is nearly four centimeters, having severed the carotid artery and trachea directly.”
“What about the bloodstains in the hallway?”
“The situation in the hallway is more complex.”
Leon flipped through his notebook.
“We found a large amount of blood and several fragments in the fifth-floor hallway.”
“We initially estimate there are at least three to four victims, but we haven’t found any complete bodies.”
Vansin turned his head to look at him.
“What do you mean by ‘no complete bodies’?”
Leon swallowed hard.
“Exactly what it sounds like, Captain Van.”
He lowered his voice.
“Only some bone fragments and skin tissue. There’s a lot of blood, but the people are gone.”
Vansin was silent for a few seconds.
“Who else lives in 502?”
“The householders had two sons. The older one is named Haruka, twenty-two years old, adopted.”
“The younger one is named Coal, nineteen years old, biological. Neither of them is currently on the scene.”
“Find them.”
After saying these two words, Vansin walked to the blasted-open main door.
He crouched down, picked up a piece of the door panel, and examined it from every angle.
This door had been smashed from the inside.
The direction of the force was from inside the room toward the hallway.
The fragments were scattered over a range of more than five meters, with the farthest piece embedded in the plaster layer of the opposite wall.
A wooden door, an ordinary solid wood door, about four centimeters thick.
Vansin used his finger to measure the depth of the fragment embedded in the wall.
Two centimeters.
What kind of force could do this to a piece of wood?
“Captain Van.”
Leon leaned in again.
“The neighbors downstairs said they heard a very loud noise around ten o’clock last night.”
“There was also shouting, but they thought it was just a fight upstairs. Since they fight every few days, no one called the police.”
“Did anyone say they saw anything?”
“A resident on the fourth floor said that around ten-thirty, he heard heavy footsteps walking down the hallway. He looked through the peephole and said he saw a figure—very tall, wearing something dark—but he couldn’t see clearly.”
Vansin stood up.
“Pull the surveillance footage.”
“We’re already working on it, but the surveillance system in this residential complex is very old. There’s only one camera at the entrance of the unit, and it’s frequently broken.”
“I don’t care if it’s broken or not, pull everything you can.”
Vansin walked to the window and looked down.
A crowd of residents had gathered downstairs, whispering to each other, and some were taking pictures.
A taxi pulled up outside the caution tape, and the door opened.
A teenager wearing a blue T-shirt ran out.
His face still looked dazed from sleep.
It was Coal.
He had gone out with friends last night and spent the night at an internet cafe.
He rushed back early this morning, seeing the police cars and the crowd downstairs from a distance.
“Let me through! That’s my home!”
Coal was jumping up and down in agitation outside the caution tape, blocked by a young police officer.
“Hello, you can’t enter for the time being.”
“I live on the fifth floor! 502! My parents are up there!”
The officer’s expression changed.
He looked back up at the building, and the walkie-talkie emitted a hiss of static.
“Captain Van, the victims’ younger son has arrived.”
Vansin was silent for two seconds on the other end of the walkie-talkie.
“Take him to the car first. Don’t let him come up.”
But it was too late.
Coal seized the moment the officer turned his head, ducked under the caution tape, and ran into the building.
He sprinted up to the fifth floor in one breath.
Then he saw the blood in the hallway.
He saw the shattered door.
He saw the two human-shaped outlines covered by white sheets in the living room.
“Dad?”
Coal’s backpack slid off his shoulder and dropped to the floor.
“Mom?”
He took a step forward, his legs gave way, and his knees hit the floor.
A detective reached out to grab him, but Coal broke free and crawled to the side of the white sheet.
He lifted a corner.
Keira’s face was revealed; her eyes were not closed, and her mouth was slightly open.
The wound on her neck looked as if it had been torn by some wild beast, and dried blood covered half her face.
Coal’s pupils dilated.
His mouth opened and closed, but he couldn’t make a sound.
After five or six seconds, a heart-wrenching wail was squeezed out of his throat.
The sound was sharp and piercing, echoing throughout the entire building.
The onlookers downstairs went quiet.
Vansin stood at the living room entrance.
Watching the teenager sobbing uncontrollably beside his mother’s body, his lips pressed into a thin line.
Two officers stepped forward, hoisted Coal up, and dragged him out.
Coal struggled desperately, kicking and flailing, his fingernails scratching against the tiles with a harsh sound.
“Mom! Mom, wake up! Dad! Dad, say something!”
His voice was already hoarse, his face smeared with tears and snot.
“Where’s my brother? Where’s my brother? Where’s Haruka?!”
As the teenager Coal was being dragged out of the unit building by the two officers, the last sentence he wailed cut through the murmurs of the crowd and the wailing of the police sirens, echoing in the damp morning air.
“Where’s my brother? What happened to him? If you find him, tell me! I’m begging you!”
Vansin stood by the fifth-floor window, watching the teenager being shoved into the backseat of the police car downstairs.
He pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag.
In his thirty years of police experience, he had seen too many family tragedies.
But this case felt strangely off from the very beginning, in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
The wooden door smashed to bits, wounds that didn’t belong to any known weapon, the missing bodies in the hallway.
And that missing adopted son, Haruka.
Ash fell onto the windowsill.
Vansin stubbed out the cigarette and turned around.
“Leon.”
“Yes.”
“Pull Haruka’s school information. Student records, his homeroom teacher’s contact info, his relationships with classmates—give me everything.”
“Understood.”
“And one more thing.”
Vansin paused.
“Check everyone who was in the vicinity last night, especially if anyone was wearing anything unusual.”
Leon was stunned for a moment.
“Unusual? What do you mean by that, Captain Van?”
Vansin glanced at the deep claw marks on the hallway wall.
There were five parallel grooves, each as thick as a little finger, embedded into the cement mortar layer.
“I don’t know either,” he said, “but whatever caused these marks was definitely not a human hand.”
Leon followed his gaze to the claw marks.
His face turned pale, little by little.
Vansin didn’t say anything more and walked out of the 502 doorway.
Stepping over the debris and dark stains filling the hallway, he walked downstairs, step by step.
The soles of his shoes pressed against the dried stains, making a faint, sticky sound.
Two of the fluorescent lights in the stairwell were broken, flickering between light and shadow.
Vansin stopped when he reached the corner of the third floor.
There was a long scrape mark on the wall.
It stretched from the third floor down to the second, as if something very heavy had been dragged along the wall.
At the end of the trail, on the landing between the second and first floors, was a small puddle of liquid that had turned completely black.
Old Sun, following behind, saw it too.
“Is this blood?” Vansin asked.
Old Sun crouched down, took a sample with a cotton swab, and leaned in to smell it.
“There’s a smell of blood, but there’s something else mixed in.”
He frowned.
“I can’t say for sure; I have to take it back for analysis.”
“How long until the results come out?”
“Two days for routine testing. If the composition is complex, it might take longer.”
Vansin nodded and continued walking down.
The camera at the entrance of the first-floor unit hung crookedly on the wall, its lens covered in a layer of dust.
The forensics technician was removing the memory card.
“Can it be used?” Vansin asked.
“Hard to say, Captain Van.”
The technician placed the memory card into an anti-static bag.
“This camera model is too old, and the video quality is very poor.”
“Plus, it rained last night, and the lens is covered in water stains. Whether we can see anything clearly, we’ll only know after we process it back at the lab.”
Vansin stood at the entrance of the unit, looking at the concrete road outside, dampened by the drizzle.
There was a trail of footprints on the road, extending from the unit door toward the residential complex wall.
The stride was huge, with more than two meters between each step.
A normal person’s stride is about seventy to eighty centimeters.
What did a stride of over two meters mean?
Either the person was running—running very fast.
Or this person had very long legs.
Very long.
Vansin crouched down to examine the shape of the footprints.
The rain had blurred the edges, but the general outline was still there.
They didn’t look like shoe prints.
They looked more like bare feet, but at least two sizes larger than a normal person’s, with several deep indentations where the toes would be, as if they had some kind of hard protrusion.
He stood up and looked toward the residential complex wall.
The wall was over two meters high, with barbed wire on top.
The barbed wire had been torn open, leaving a large hole in one spot.
The edges of the wire were curled outward, and the break was fresh.
Vansin stared for a long time, stubbed out the half-finished cigarette, and tucked it into his pocket.
“Old Sun.”
“Hmm?”
“Do you believe there are things in this world that humans cannot do?”
Old Sun paused for a moment and laughed.
“Captain Van, you’re saying that? We’re in criminal investigation, not metaphysics.”
Vansin didn’t laugh.
He stared at the torn opening in the barbed wire.
Raindrops dripped down the curled tips of the wire—drip, drop.
“I hope so.”
He turned around and walked toward the police car.