Chapter 58.1: Impossible to Enjoy Eating in Peace
“I also brought a mimeograph machine,” Jiang Xia added. “We can print over a hundred copies of the portrait in an hour and distribute them.”
This was more than just having a caring mother—it was practically timely rain, a lifesaver!
“Good, good, good!”
Xu Changsong’s face lit up. “Da Lu, hurry and take Jiang Xia over there on the sidecar motorcycle. Right now!”
“Got it!”
Jiang Xia hurried back to the dormitory to get her full set of tools. Forensic Doctor Hu, who was quite familiar with the hospital, thought carefully about the Workers’ Hospital and added:
“Chief Xu, if I remember correctly, women giving birth used to mainly go to the Maternal and Child Health Hospital. There shouldn’t have been that many who went to the Workers’ Hospital. How about having Granny Yin go over and take another look? We might be able to narrow down the general area where the remaining two victims were from. That way, when we start searching later, we’ll at least have a primary direction to focus on.”
“Good.”
Xu Changsong agreed immediately. “Let’s do that.”
There was only one sidecar motorcycle, so this time they picked Zhu Weijun, who knew how to ride a motorcycle. Xu Changsong called the hospital back and asked them to arrange for someone to meet and receive them.
There was no denying that driving was much faster than riding a bicycle. With so few cars on the roads at this time of year, they didn’t run into any traffic, and it took only about twenty minutes for the group to arrive at the Workers’ Hospital.
The head of personnel was already waiting at the main entrance. With such a huge mess having occurred under his administration, he was naturally in no particularly good mood, and his expression was inevitably rather grim. The moment he saw them arrive, however, he hurriedly forced a smile and stepped forward to greet them.
“Hello, comrades from the Public Security Bureau.”
“The situation is urgent, so let’s skip the pleasantries.”
Da Lu didn’t bother shaking hands. He got straight to the point.
“Comrade, take us directly to the archives. And find us someone who knew Zhao Youde well, too.”
“Ah, sure.”
The head of personnel forced himself to perk up. As he led the way, he explained, “Hospitals have special regulations. Patient records, especially inpatient records, as well as birth certificates and the like, are supposed to be kept permanently. Of course, in practice… things don’t always work out that way. But records from the past ten years or so are still fairly easy to find. There are just a lot of them. They’re all stored downstairs.”
With that, the head of personnel led them into the outpatient building and down the stairs.
Jiang Xia looked around.
They soon reached the first basement level.
The lights were somewhat dim. The surroundings weren’t much different from those upstairs. There were ticket windows, along with numerous departments and wards. The signs above the doors hadn’t been removed yet, but all the doors were closed, making the place look as though it had long since been abandoned.
The building style looked like it was from more than a decade ago. At the time, with the threat of nuclear war hanging over the country, China had begun constructing all kinds of air-raid shelters and underground structures. This hospital was no exception, so that it could still serve a purpose even after a bombing.
“These rows of rooms are all for patient records,” the head of personnel said as they walked. “Hardly anyone ever looks at them, but we can’t throw them away either. So we have people come down here specifically to organize them and check for things like insects, rats, mold, and so on. There are two people responsible for it—Old Sun and Old Tan.”
“There’s also a morgue down here, besides the archives.”
“Patients’ bodies that can’t be taken away immediately are kept over there. People steal corpses too, so someone has to keep watch at night.”
“The problem is, it’s such a creepy job that hardly anyone has the nerve to do it. Zhao Youde had a comminuted fracture in his lower leg. By the time he was brought in, it had already been nearly two weeks since the fracture. It was too late—the bone had already begun to heal improperly. Even after surgery, they couldn’t fix it, and he ended up crippled. Then he couldn’t find any work. His attending physician felt sorry for him and introduced him to this job. They even took care of his food and lodging.”
“He was a pretty honest fellow in his daily life, too. He diligently stood guard every night, and during the day he’d help Old Sun and Old Tan with their work and such.”
By the end, the head of personnel still looked completely baffled.
“Who could have imagined he’d actually go and hurt people?”
“No one can know what goes on in a bad person’s mind.”
Jiang Xia looked up at the head of personnel, having no idea whether he was simply complaining or meant something else.
The doctor who had helped Zhao Youde get the job was truly unlucky. As for Old Sun and Old Tan, their behavior was harder to say. There were clearly loopholes in the hospital’s management.
“Right now, the most important thing is to find Zhao Youde as quickly as possible and rescue all three children. As long as the children are still alive, everything else can be dealt with.”
“Ah.”
The head of personnel stiffened for a moment, then hurriedly echoed her.
“Yes, yes. The most important thing now is finding the children.”
As they spoke, they arrived at the room where the birth certificates were stored.
The room had already been opened. Warm orange light spilled through the doorway, and a man in his fifties stood at the entrance, looking both disgruntled and uneasy.
“Old Tan, these Comrade Police officers are here to have you give a verbal description of Zhao Youde for a portrait.”
The head of personnel turned his head.
He knew Da Lu, but Da Lu clearly didn’t have this skill. He wasn’t familiar with the person carrying the toolbox, but he probably wasn’t the artist either. The female police officer was far too young. That left the older Granny Yin, who seemed like the likely candidate.
But why was she dressed like a fortune-teller rather than a portrait artist?
He cautiously asked one more question.
“Which comrade will be drawing the portrait?”
“I will.”
Jiang Xia took the case from Zhu Weijun, pulled out a hardbound notebook and a charcoal pencil, and quickly sketched out a basic crosshair framework.
At the same time, she asked Old Tan, who was watching curiously, “Comrade Tan, is Zhao Youde’s face more square or more round? Is his chin pointed?”
“More square. The man’s got a really broad chin.”
The head of personnel stared at Jiang Xia in astonishment. He had never imagined that someone this young would be the one doing the portrait.
Even Granny Yin’s eyes widened.
‘Good heavens. This young woman actually has this kind of skill?’
“Old Granny Yin, stop staring and look here first.”
Zhu Weijun said, “Zhao Youde is clearly choosing his victims according to the Five Elements. Think again about roughly what dates the other two—those associated with Metal and Fire—would fall on. We can use that to figure out how many people there are.”
“What are you talking about? There are twelve double-hours in a day. Zi corresponds to Water, Chou to Earth, Yin to Wood, Si to Fire, Shen to Metal, and so on. There are also Yin and Yang forms of each element. By that logic, there would be people belonging to Metal and Fire born every single day. We can’t narrow it down that way.”
Faced with such an utterly clueless layman, Granny Yin felt like she had two heads to deal with. Suppressing the urge to tell him to leave, she thought for a while before saying, “Give me a moment to calculate it again. He must be choosing children born at particularly unusual times.”
“June 21, September 23, December 22… Hiss. Those dates are the Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice! He’s going by the solar terms. In summer, the Wood qi flourishes; winter is dominated by the extreme cold of Water; Earth belongs at the end of each season. As for why he chose the Autumnal Equinox… I don’t know.”
“Going by that logic, the season with the best destiny would naturally be around the Great Heat—the hottest time of the year. Since this man chose two children born in 1976, the date that year should have been July 23. The time would be during Si or Wu, meaning children born between nine in the morning and one in the afternoon.”
“A Metal destiny belongs to autumn, which would be around White Dew—September 8, during Shen or You, from three to nine in the afternoon.”
That narrowed the range considerably.
Da Lu and Zhu Weijun exchanged a glance before ducking into the archives. They began searching through the records with Old Sun.
The birth certificates were only single sheets of paper, bundled together by month in kraft-paper envelopes. After years of sorting, the records were no longer in any particular order. Fortunately, there weren’t too many of them—just a little over a hundred. They went through them one by one, counting and checking the times.
In the end, they found five birth certificates that matched the criteria.
The good news was that all five listed the families’ addresses.
“Hongqi Alley, Kaituo Road…”
Da Lu took off his briefcase and pulled out some paper and a pen. He copied down all five addresses from the birth certificates.
“We’ll deploy people around these houses. There’s a chance we can lie in wait and catch Zhao Youde there.”
“There are also the elementary schools these children attend.”
Jiang Xia came over carrying the freshly printed portraits. “Especially the routes home that take them away from the school gates.”
People were relatively lax about raising children in those days. Parents would still pick up and drop off children at the nursery school—what we would now call kindergarten—but once a child started elementary school, quite a few parents felt comfortable letting them walk to and from school with an older sibling or a group of friends. They stopped escorting them themselves.
Normally, this wasn’t much of a problem. But when danger struck, it could be deadly.
“I’ve finished the portraits on my end.”
As she spoke, Jiang Xia handed over more than a hundred copies.
“Comrade Lu, Comrade Zhu, please get these distributed as quickly as possible. I’ll head back to the municipal bureau on my own.”
“Okay.”
Catching Zhao Youde as soon as possible was what mattered, so neither man bothered with unnecessary politeness. They called Chief Xu to report the situation, then each took half the portraits and headed for the local police station and the nearby road intersections.
Xu Changsong also immediately began mobilizing personnel.
Unlike Da Lu, he didn’t think there was much chance of catching Zhao Youde by staking out the children’s homes.
After all, his limp was such a distinctive characteristic that even if people couldn’t remember his face after only a few glances, they would remember that a limping man had been hanging around their neighborhood. If Zhao Youde frequently loitered nearby, he would easily arouse suspicion.
The man was probably lying in wait somewhere else.
With that in mind, Xu Changsong didn’t have the local police station deploy people to stake out the five children’s homes. Instead, using each home as a central point, he had officers spread out to key locations and search for anyone matching the portrait.
After all, ever since seeing Jin Weitao’s appearance, he had become a true believer in Jiang Xia’s drawing skills. She had practically taken the criminal’s face and transmitted it straight across the air.
As long as they had the portrait in hand, there was absolutely no way they could mistake him for someone else.
Now all they could hope for was that Zhao Youde was wandering around outside, allowing them to catch him and bring him in today.
After hanging up the phone, that was the only thought occupying Xu Changsong’s mind.
*
On the road a little over two hundred meters east of the entrance to Hongxing Elementary School, a sanitation worker riding a small three-wheeled vehicle slowly pulled over to the side.
He climbed down from the vehicle and slowly sat on the curb beside the sidewalk. Taking the water bottle from the handlebars, he tipped his head back and took a long gulp.
The midsummer sun mercilessly scorched the earth. Sweat streamed from the heads of passersby, and everyone was eager to get out of the heat as quickly as possible. Not a single person spared the sanitation worker sitting on the curb a glance. If anything, they seemed intent on keeping as far away as possible from his three-wheeled vehicle, already piled high with garbage and giving off an unpleasant stench.
Seeing this, Zhao Youde couldn’t help shrinking back awkwardly.
His head hung slightly, but his eyes involuntarily followed the lower legs of the people passing by. He stared enviously, watching them approach from a distance, then watching them recede again, until they disappeared from sight. Only then did he reluctantly look away.
He used to have a good leg, too.
The farmland belonging to their production brigade was poor, classified as low-grade fields. Every year, their harvest fell far short of those of the other brigades. They could barely put enough food on the table, let alone afford to marry off their young men.
So the brigade leader gritted his teeth and organized a construction crew during the slack farming season, sending them into the city to build large houses for people and earn some money.
At the time, Zhao Youde was young and strong. Wearing the only complete set of clothes his family owned—patched up, but still presentable—he went into the city with them.
He had no particular trade, so he could only work as a laborer. Fortunately, he was young and strong, and even doing nothing more than carrying bricks and pushing cement, he managed to save up a decent amount of money. He returned home and married a wife.
The following year, they had a son.
Zhao Youde felt that his life was becoming more and more promising.
But happiness was fleeting. Before long, his worries began piling up. With a new child in the family, elderly parents to support and a young son to raise, there was money to spend everywhere, and the pressure on Zhao Youde grew heavier and heavier.
The brigade took construction jobs according to the farming seasons. When it was time for busy farm work, they would return home to help with the harvest and planting. Most construction sites understood and would stop work for a while, giving them leave.
But the year before last, the construction site where they were working was in a hurry to meet a deadline. They offered double pay to anyone willing to stay and keep working in the city.
None of the villagers working there wanted to stay. They all still intended to go home.
But Zhao Youde hesitated.
If he stayed, he could earn two days’ worth of wages for every day he worked. That meant earning two whole months’ worth of extra money compared to everyone else!
Besides, his younger brother was old enough now to take his place.
With that in mind, Zhao Youde decided to stay.
He was assigned to another group of newly recruited workers. At first, everything went smoothly.
Until that day, when he was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with bricks up to the construction site.
That’s when the nightmare happened.
The scaffolding collapsed.
A huge pile of bricks came crashing down. The wheelbarrow tipped over, taking Zhao Youde down with it and crushing his leg beneath it.
At the time, the pain in his right lower leg felt as though countless giant awls were stabbing into it over and over. By the time the other workers frantically cleared away the bricks and lifted the wheelbarrow to help him up, Zhao Youde realized that his right leg could no longer support his weight.
His vision swam with pain.
The construction foreman came over, pulled up his trouser leg, and took a look. Seeing only some minor scrapes, he told Zhao Youde that he was fine. He gave him a day off to rest in the workers’ quarters and told him to come back and continue working the next day.
Zhao Youde believed him.
He rested for a day, but his leg didn’t get better. Instead, the pain became even worse, and it gradually began to swell.
The foreman came to take another look and reassured him that it was nothing serious. He claimed to have a secret family remedy that could definitely reduce the swelling and relieve the pain. He slapped a medicinal plaster onto Zhao Youde’s leg and left again.
But the plaster didn’t work either.
The sharp pain gradually turned into a constant, dull ache. Zhao Youde could barely feel that his right foot was there anymore.
Panic finally set in.
After repeatedly begging and pleading, he finally convinced some workers he barely knew to take him to the hospital.
The doctor told him he’d come far too late. His leg was severely infected, the nerves had begun to die, and the bones were already undergoing abnormal healing. If he didn’t have surgery immediately, he might have to undergo an amputation.
Even after surgery, though, his leg would never return to normal.
How had his perfectly good right leg ended up like this?!
Zhao Youde couldn’t even begin to imagine how he was supposed to live without one of his legs. He could only take out all the savings he’d accumulated and beg the doctor to operate on him.
The only problem was, the doctor was a quack.
He underwent surgery, but his leg was practically as good as amputated. He could only walk with a limp, and it still hurt whenever he walked.
The doctor told him that this was because he hadn’t had enough time to recover and that the healing process had been insufficient. He needed to rest, and even if he recovered well, he would never be able to do heavy physical labor again.
Zhao Youde felt as though the sky had come crashing down.
All he had was his physical strength. Both his family back home and his life in the city depended on him doing hard labor in exchange for money and food. If he could no longer do heavy work, how was that any different from being useless?
He was completely dazed.
He wanted to find the construction foreman who had deceived him, but the man had only recruited workers temporarily to deal with the labor shortage. Once the busy farming season was over, he had already taken his workers and disappeared without a trace.
Zhao Youde didn’t dare go home either. He was afraid everyone would find out that he was now a cripple. He was afraid…
Zhao Youde wandered around the city in a daze for several days, with only one thought left in his mind.
He had to heal his leg.
As long as he could heal his leg, everything would return to normal.
But medical treatment cost money. He had no money and couldn’t find any work he was capable of doing.
Fortunately, although the doctor who had treated him was incompetent, he had a kind heart. Seeing that Zhao Youde couldn’t even afford to eat, he introduced him to a job guarding corpses.
At least now he had somewhere to live, a job, and an income. He wouldn’t be treated as a mangliu and arrested for vagrancy and sent back home, and he could save money for medical treatment.