Chapter 55.2: Asking Big Sis to Take the Blame
Chen Yongyi continued analyzing the case.
“If the killer disposed of the remains farther away but buried them nearby, then there’s a good chance they lived in one of the surrounding villages. A six-year-old child is already over a meter tall and weighs at least seventeen or eighteen kilograms. That’s not easy to dispose of. Most likely, the killer would have to be someone living alone to have the right conditions to commit the crime. Did you investigate the people living alone back then?”
“Not specifically.”
Xu Changsong shook his head slightly.
“But if I remember correctly, housing was tight throughout that entire commune. There were basically no widowers living completely alone. Even if there were, their homes would have been right next to their neighbors. The smell from killing and boiling a body wouldn’t be insignificant. It would have been very difficult to keep that hidden from the people around them. If a villager had really done it, they probably would’ve been discovered and dragged to the police station long ago.”
Chen Yongyi confirmed again.
“There really weren’t any people living alone? Forest rangers, hunters, or anyone like that?”
“No. Quzhou City is flatland. We don’t have any mountains, not even hills.”
Xu Changsong thought for a moment.
“There are some woods over there, and there are forest rangers, but they live there as a family. More than a dozen people live together on the edge of the forest. Doesn’t exactly sound like a cannibal would be hiding among them.”
“Then that’s strange.”
The case was becoming more and more difficult.
Chen Yongyi’s brows drew downward, deepening the wrinkles on his forehead.
“If none of the people nearby had the opportunity to commit the crime, then the killer was probably an outsider. But what kind of person would come all the way here just to bury a gnawed piece of lower-leg bone in the wasteland outside Xiao Wang Village?”
Everyone fell silent.
The behavior simply didn’t fit any conventional way of disposing of a body. No one could make sense of what the killer was actually trying to accomplish.
Forensic Doctor Hu tried to come up with several more possibilities, but one after another, she ruled them all out based on the clues they had. Unable to take it anymore, she blurted out, “This killer is practically insane. Who knows what the hell he was trying to accomplish?”
Xu Changsong felt his temples throbbing as well. He said helplessly, “If the killer really is an outsider, then the search area is far too broad. We have no idea where to even start.”
“Then the key is still the act of burying the leg bone.”
Chen Yongyi said, “Something this far outside the norm must have a reason that we don’t know about, but that was extremely important to the killer.”
Forensic Doctor Hu agreed with that reasoning, but after racking her brain for a while, she still came up completely blank.
“The problem is, normal people can’t possibly understand the thoughts of someone who’s mentally twisted.”
She gave up on tormenting herself.
“Who knows what kind of absurd reason a psychopath might have for doing something?”
She wasn’t wrong.
As the saying went, the most dangerous thing is when a fool suddenly gets a flash of inspiration. Normal people had no way of predicting what such a person would do or how they would do it. You could easily be caught completely off guard and end up falling into a huge trap because of their actions.
The same applied to killers with abnormal, warped ways of thinking. Their motives could be completely different from those of ordinary people, making their behavior virtually impossible to predict.
But Jiang Xia didn’t think that was the case.
Choosing a location, digging a hole, and burying the bones was a whole chain of deliberate actions. It didn’t seem like something a mentally unstable person would do. The killer’s thinking was clearly very organized.
And if someone with a perfectly clear mind deliberately carried out such an irrational act, then it had to be, just as Expert Chen had concluded, because of some more important objective.
In other words, the killer wasn’t eating people merely to satisfy their appetite.
So what could connect cannibalism with burying bones in a specific location?
Knowledge from Uncle Ba’s little classroom surfaced in Jiang Xia’s mind, and there were so many possibilities that even she was left speechless.
Seventy percent were various kinds of religious rituals—from granting a lamb salvation, to praying for wealth, casting curses, sending souls to heaven, preparing for resurrection, or facilitating reincarnation.
Another twenty-five percent were obedience tests conducted by various fringe groups.
And the remaining five percent were simply attempts to provoke the police…
Jiang Xia took a deep breath.
As expected of America. The place was truly blessed with an abundance of… colorful characters. All sorts of heroes had gathered there to make history together. There was just too much material!
Setting aside the possibilities that didn’t fit the circumstances in China, Jiang Xia quickly singled out one that seemed relatively plausible given the evidence.
Superstition.
“If this was done by an outsider, then I don’t think this person is mentally ill.”
She spoke up.
“He was able to carry the tools and human remains with him, find the wasteland outside Xiao Wang Village precisely, dig a deep hole, place the bones inside, and cover them back up. That requires a considerable degree of planning and capability. This is something a perfectly normal person could do.”
Xu Changsong nodded in agreement.
“I agree.”
“At the beginning, we put cannibalism first and assumed the killer simply liked eating people. But judging from the abnormal behavior, eating the flesh was probably only one part of the entire act. There must have been another purpose.”
Jiang Xia continued.
“I’m not sure what the feng shui is like in that wasteland outside Xiao Wang Village, but considering the fact that the killer specifically came here to bury a lower-leg bone, the act has a very strong ritualistic quality to it. There’s a good chance religious or superstitious beliefs played a role.”
Smack!
Hearing this, Chen Yongyi’s eyes lit up. He slapped a hand down on the table.
“That actually makes a lot of sense!”
“Isn’t that just superstition?”
Xu Changsong’s face twisted slightly. He found it difficult to believe that could be the motive.
“Didn’t we wipe all that out during the campaign against the Four Olds? Back then, I arrested plenty of village shamans and fortune-tellers myself. At most, those people would tell fortunes or sell incense ash and talismans. How could they possibly get to the point of eating people?”
“Not necessarily. Some more extreme cults do practice blood sacrifices. That can include burying corpses in specific locations in the hope of changing one’s fortune.”
Even after saying this, Chen Yongyi grew somewhat hesitant.
“But cannibalism… I’ve never heard of or seen anything like that either. Even when Yiguandao was causing trouble back then, there was nothing like this.”
Yiguandao was one of the largest cults in China around the time of the founding of the People’s Republic. It incorporated ideas from the White Lotus tradition, Taoism, Buddhism, and other beliefs. Its members used the guise of charity and superstition to amass wealth on a massive scale. At its peak, it had more than three million followers, and its activities were highly reactionary. The government ultimately wiped out its core leadership in just one month.
However, because of the sheer number of people involved, it took three years to suppress and dismantle Yiguandao nationwide. Even afterward, it repeatedly resurfaced, with members occasionally popping up out of nowhere to deceive people and make money.
“Any cult that grows large enough to cause trouble must still operate above the general public’s bottom line. The same goes for the village shamans and mediums living among ordinary people. They certainly wouldn’t engage in behavior this depraved.”
Jiang Xia pondered for a moment.
“But a very small number of cults can be extremely inhumane. If they practice blood sacrifices, then it’s not particularly surprising that some of them might also consume parts of the victim. It’s just that… our country basically doesn’t have that kind of cultural tradition. So where would the killer have encountered something like this?”
“Huh?”
Xu Changsong pressed his lips into a thin line. He couldn’t help asking, “You’re saying this sort of thing differs between China and other countries?”
“It does.”
Jiang Xia explained, “Our traditional superstitious practices are mostly about making offerings to ancestors, ghosts, and gods. The emphasis is on sacrificing things to them, not eating people. But some foreign religions actually have scriptures in which the Son directly tells believers to eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to gain eternal life. That kind of tradition has existed in their culture since ancient times.”
There was no internet nowadays, and as an ordinary person, Jiang Xia shouldn’t have known this much about foreign customs. Since she dared to bring it up, naturally she’d already prepared an explanation.
Before Xu Changsong could ask, she explained:
“I heard this from an old overseas Chinese who had returned from abroad when I was little. He said that the Americans never went through a campaign to eliminate the Four Olds, so they had especially many cults. There was one called something… Satan or Mormon, I think? Apparently, their initiation ceremony involved eating people. And there were all kinds of psychopathic killers over there, so life was really difficult for Chinese people. Back then, I thought he was just trying to scare me and treated it all like a horror story. But thinking about it now, I guess it was all true.”
Everything above is fabricated except for the content itself. The old overseas Chinese really did exist. He was officially recognized as an overseas Chinese who had suffered persecution abroad, and during those years he cooperated extensively with the propaganda campaigns, recounting his suffering and denouncing American imperialism. His stories really did include a few psychopathic killers.
He had also died a natural death in 1976, so there was absolutely no way anyone could investigate the story now. He was practically the perfect person to use as an excuse.
“An overseas Chinese who returned to the country? Then that really is possible.”
The moment Xu Changsong heard that background, his lingering doubts immediately disappeared.
After the founding of the People’s Republic, quite a few overseas Chinese returned home. It was perfectly normal for them to tell others about their experiences, and they generally wouldn’t be assumed to be lying. Xu Changsong just hadn’t expected that despite America’s advanced technology, things there could secretly be so terrifying.
Thinking this, Xu Changsong looked back at Jiang Xia.
She’d been so young when she’d listened to something like that and hadn’t even been frightened enough to have nightmares. Her nerve really was something else.
“What a load of rotten nonsense.”
Chen Yongyi listened with a stern expression. He shook his head, then looked back at the leg bone.
“But if that’s the case, this could be some obscure, secretive cult, or perhaps some kind of occult practice. It might even be something known only to a single individual.”
“Then someone like that would definitely hide themselves very well. It won’t be easy to investigate.”
At this point in their deductions, they seemed to have arrived at a vague profile of the culprit, but when they examined it carefully, they still had no concrete direction for the investigation.
Xu Changsong frowned slightly.
“How about this? Once the family murder case is wrapped up, I’ll send someone to find some well-known village shamans and mediums and have them take a look at that wasteland outside Xiao Wang Village. Maybe they’ll know if there’s some significance to the place.”
“I think that’s worth trying.”
Chen Yongyi nodded slightly.
“These superstitious practices generally revolve around things like accumulating wealth, cursing people, extending one’s lifespan, or changing one’s luck. The underlying principles tend to overlap as well. They should be able to give us a rough idea, which would at least give us another direction to investigate.”
Jiang Xia rubbed her chin.
Jiang Xia couldn’t shake the feeling that the conclusions she’d drawn from Uncle Ba and the others didn’t quite fit the local circumstances.
No matter how sinister the cults in China were, cases involving cannibalism were extremely rare. More often, they involved symbolic parts of the body—such as the internal organs, especially the heart and blood from the heart—with the goal usually being something like extending one’s lifespan.
But actually eating flesh and gnawing on bones…
What possible use could that have?
She couldn’t figure it out.
Unfortunately, this time the system’s rewards hadn’t included anything related to China. She didn’t know much about the Five Elements, Bagua, yin-yang theories, or similar subjects either. They would have to wait for someone with specialized knowledge to examine the matter before they could know for sure.
As she thought about it, Jiang Xia looked at the lower-leg bone, and a thought suddenly occurred to her.
Could it have some special significance to the killer?
It was possible. But there were simply too few remains. If they had the entire skeleton and only the lower-leg bone was abnormal, that would be one thing. But drawing such a conclusion from a single section of tibia could easily lead them astray.
“We also need to screen records of children who have gone missing in the city and surrounding towns.”
This brainstorming session had been both exhausting and nauseating. Fortunately, they’d finally managed to come to some conclusions.
Xu Changsong sighed.
“We’ll have to check the records in each district for that. We don’t even know whether the parents reported their children missing.”
The victimized child had almost certainly been abducted. But when a child went missing in those days, a family’s first reaction generally wasn’t to call the police. They would usually assume the child had simply gone somewhere to play. It often took a day or two of not finding them before they realized something was wrong and came to report it.
And that was in the city. In rural areas, families might not even report a missing child at all.
Getting a clear picture of the situation would be a massive undertaking.
Xu Changsong felt a headache just thinking about it. They hadn’t even solved the family murder case yet. Even if they did, the officers under him had been working around the clock up until now. They would need time before they could take on another case.
There was only so much back-to-back investigating people could do before they collapsed from exhaustion.
“For now, all we can hope is that the killer doesn’t strike again anytime soon.”
“I hope so too.”
Chen Yongyi nodded slightly as well. He was just about to continue when he suddenly heard a burst of hurried footsteps outside, as though someone was rushing down the stairs.
Xu Changsong’s spirits immediately lifted. He stood up and hurried to the doorway, pushing it open as he eagerly asked the officer coming up behind him:
“Do we have a lead on the family murder case?!”
“We do, Director Xu! The Qidong Road Police Station reported that there’s a young man named Jin Weitao who looks exactly like the person in the portrait!”
The officer who had been the last one downstairs stopped when Xu Changsong asked him that. He turned around, gripping the railing, his arm trembling slightly with excitement as he answered:
“The guy’s an mangliu. He’s got several friends who are mangliu too. One of them has even been arrested for burglary before. Someone saw him go out that day wearing a blue shirt and black pants, exactly like the suspect in the portrait. His neighbors also said he never came home that night!”
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**TN
Mangliu (盲流) is a historical Chinese term, especially associated with the 1950s–1980s, for people who left their registered rural hometowns and drifted into cities without official household registration or authorization.
Literally, 盲流 means something like “blind drifters”