The icy cold voice from the receiver—those weighty words, “Wang Chang is dead”—still echoed in her ears.
Lin Yanqiu had already told Hua Qi’an to go home.
Once again, the office fell into a dead silence.
She closed her eyes and leaned back in the wide leather chair, her fingertips unconsciously tapping the desk.
The police station again.
She had just left there the day before.
It was as if the scent of formalin and the lingering, faint fishy smell still clung to her hands.
That had been a particularly troublesome corpse.
Though it hadn’t soaked in water for very long.
Still, the contradictions between the condition of the body and the objective facts had brought her no small amount of trouble in her work.
She hadn’t expected trouble to come knocking again so soon.
The A4 papers on her desk had already been fed into the shredder by Hua Qi’an.
The coolness and slight sting from her arm reminded Lin Yanqiu of everything that had just occurred.
The printer gone haywire, the malfunctioning door lock, the news of Wang Chang’s death…
All of it exuded an eerie sense of losing control that left her deeply unsettled.
She despised this feeling.
Grabbing the black trench coat draped over the chair, Lin Yanqiu wasted no more time and strode out of the office.
Her black high heels tapped sharply and urgently against the polished floor of the administration building.
Her red sports car let out a low, guttural roar.
Like a flash of lightning, it sped toward the somewhat remote police station.
…
The police station was as tense and busy as ever.
The mingled scents of smoke, sweat, and the damp paper from the records room permeated the air.
The moment Lin Yanqiu stepped through the door, a young man in uniform with black-rimmed glasses hurried up, bowing obsequiously.
“Senior Sister! You’re finally here!”
The man looked no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, but right now he was drenched in sweat, his eyes filled with the relief and unconcealed admiration of one who had survived a calamity.
He had been Lin Yanqiu’s junior at university, a few years behind her, and after graduation had joined the forensics department here.
Though the location was remote, the benefit was that work was usually light.
There was hardly anything to do most days.
But now, trouble had come knocking.
Lin Yanqiu had little impression of him, merely nodding coldly in greeting.
“What’s the situation?”
Her voice was cool, devoid of any excess emotion.
“Senior Sister, you have no idea, this is already the third case in just a few days! I… I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep for days!”
The junior’s voice trembled with a hint of sobbing as he hurried after Lin Yanqiu, rattling off the details.
Lin Yanqiu’s stride did not falter, but her frown deepened.
“Just the important points.”
“Yes! It’s Wang Chang!”
The junior snapped to attention, quickly cutting to the chase.
“It’s the case that was just discovered today. The autopsy report is done, but… but the situation is just too complicated! Our… our director wasn’t confident, so we wanted to ask you to come take a look!”
Lin Yanqiu had already heard much of this from the section chief on the phone. Wang Chang…
That name stabbed into her mind again like a thorn.
She recalled that bizarre scene in her office—the person in that black-and-white, oversized student photo, printed out like a memorial portrait…
An inexplicable irritability welled up inside her.
She hadn’t expected it to actually become a real memorial photo.
“Where’s the body?”
“In the autopsy room!”
She pushed open the heavy metal door, and a powerful smell of disinfectant rushed out to greet her.
But no matter how strong the disinfectant, it could never fully mask the underlying stench of death and decay.
On the autopsy table, a male corpse covered by a white sheet lay silently.
The junior stepped forward and, with trembling hands, lifted the sheet.
“It’s him.”
Even though the body had become swollen and disfigured from soaking in water, that distinctive perm and the vaguely recognizable facial features allowed Lin Yanqiu to identify him at a glance.
It was indeed Wang Chang.
That hairstyle was certainly memorable.
“Tell me what you know.”
Lin Yanqiu donned latex gloves, her voice as cold as a scalpel.
“Deceased: Wang Chang. Preliminary determination of time of death is late last night to early this morning. Cause of death: drowning.”
The junior flipped open his report and recited by the book.
“But the strange thing is, he has multiple fractures and contusions from blunt force trauma, especially the right arm—there’s an abnormal secondary fracture at a weird angle… and…”
He swallowed hard, his voice growing dry.
“His skull… there’s a crack, as if someone struck him hard with a heavy object, almost… almost pried it open…”
“We can’t determine whether those injuries happened before or after he entered the water, nor can we confirm the exact cause of death. So…”
“Drowned?”
Lin Yanqiu cut him off, eyes falling on the corpse’s pale, swollen face.
An ordinary person would have been shaking with fear, but Lin Yanqiu was long used to it.
“Where was he found?”
“In a pond at an abandoned house, dozens of kilometers from the city.”
The junior’s voice grew suddenly small.
He nervously looked away.
“That’s… that’s the same place you handled that drowning case a couple of days ago, Senior Sister.”
Lin Yanqiu’s hand paused.
Three people drowned in the same pond in just a few days?
That was far from normal.
“Wasn’t he supposed to be in the hospital with a fractured arm?”
Lin Yanqiu recalled what Hua Qi’an had said in the office that afternoon.
Wang Chang was supposed to have been admitted to the hospital last night with a fractured arm.
How could he have drowned at dawn, dozens of kilometers away, in an abandoned estate’s pond?
The junior’s expression looked as if he’d seen a ghost.
“We checked. The hospital said after his arm surgery yesterday, he just disappeared! Next thing anyone knew… he was found floating in that pond!”
He paused, voice dropping even lower, bordering on collapse.
“The freakiest part is…”
“Because of the case from a couple days ago, some of our people hadn’t even left the estate completely. They’d just gone to switch shifts, and when they came back, there he was… floating facedown in the water…”
Now Lin Yanqiu understood.
She understood why the usually composed section chief had sounded so frantic, calling her for help.
A man who should have been convalescing in a hospital dozens of kilometers away had somehow appeared without a sound in a recently crime-scene-sealed pond, and drowned in bizarre circumstances.
In a sense, it could almost be called police negligence.
No wonder everyone here was sweating buckets, desperate to get to the bottom of the case.
Lin Yanqiu said no more.
She picked up the autopsy scalpel and began her work.
“Fluid in the chest cavity, with algae and silt… typical of drowning.”
“The right humerus shows an old fracture, but there are signs of a secondary break—the fracture line is irregular, likely from violent struggling and pulling.”
“Three broken ribs. Obvious radiating fractures on the top of the skull, from multiple blunt force impacts… All these injuries occurred before he entered the water.”
As she dissected, she stated her findings in that same cold, emotionless tone.
“The deceased engaged in a violent altercation before drowning. He was struck in the head with a heavy object, causing his skull to crack, which left him unable to resist further and led to him being pushed into, or falling into, the pond and drowning.”
The conclusion was clear.
“…This was murder.”
When Lin Yanqiu peeled off her bloodstained gloves and stepped out of the suffocating autopsy room, night had already fallen.
She finished the autopsy report and felt utterly drained.
Just as she was about to leave this place of trouble, a young officer in criminal police uniform came running down the corridor in a hurry.
“Professor Lin! Please wait, Professor Lin!”
The young officer stopped before her, panting, his face a mix of excitement and tension.
“We… we’ve found a lead!”
Lin Yanqiu raised an eyebrow.
She wasn’t part of the police—what did their breakthrough have to do with her?
But she didn’t interrupt, only signaled him to go on.
“We interrogated a few of Wang Chang’s cronies. One of them said that a few hours before Wang Chang disappeared, he’d sent them a message!”
The young officer held out his phone for Lin Yanqiu, displaying a screenshot of a chat record.
Lin Yanqiu understood immediately.
Their section chief must have given tacit approval.
Clearly, that guy was already at his wits’ end, clutching at straws.
Lin Yanqiu looked at the chat log on the screen.
[Wang Chang: You all go have your fun, I’ve got something serious to take care of.]
[Crony A: Wang-ge, what serious thing?]
[Wang Chang: Date! Damn, that girl finally agreed to see me, heh, I didn’t think someone who looked so proper would actually ask me out at this hour… Tonight I’ve got to win her over!]
Lin Yanqiu’s gaze lingered on the word “date” for a moment, her eyes growing slightly cold.
“We asked that crony about the girl Wang Chang was talking about…”
The young officer swallowed, carefully watching Lin Yanqiu’s face.
“She’s… really cool, really beautiful, kind of sickly looking.”
“Given what happened on the university forum a couple days ago, they all think Wang Chang was talking about someone from the Archaeology Department at Hangyang University—”
“Hua Qi’an.”
The moment that name left his lips, the air seemed to drop to freezing.
Lin Yanqiu’s expression didn’t change in the slightest.
But in the depths of those sharp, knife-like eyes, a tidal wave of icy cold erupted.
“Nonsense.”
Lin Yanqiu’s voice was soft, but it was laced with frost.
Her severe gaze made the young officer shudder involuntarily.
…
“Yesterday afternoon, Hua Qi’an was with me the whole time.”
She raised her eyes, calmly meeting the officer’s uncertain gaze.
In an unassailable, matter-of-fact tone, she enunciated each word: “If she was on a date at that time, then the only possible date was with me.”