Chapter 82: Points of Resemblance

The moment I gave the order, Luo Feng’s men carried it out.

Until then, they had never given up searching for traces of Xuan Yi, but clearly, that was no longer something they could keep doing. If the police investigated, it would be easy to discover that Luo Feng’s people were looking for someone, and that would put Luo Feng at a disadvantage.

I thought it over. Turning to Wang Yazhuo, I was about to speak when she smiled at me first and once again stressed that she would definitely help me keep searching for Xuan Yi. She was generous, telling me that if I needed anything else from her, I could ask without hesitation. But soon after, Wang Yazhuo looked troubled and said, “My grandfather will be back soon. I can’t help you for many more days. Once he returns, I’ll need to use my own people, and then it won’t be so easy. So if there’s anything you want me to do, speak up while there’s still time.”

I gave her a grateful smile. What I wanted Wang Yazhuo to do, besides continuing the search for Xuan Yi, was another thing: spread the news that a certain female star was raising a kumanthong.

Although rumors already existed, I felt they were still not fierce enough. I asked Wang Yazhuo to find a way to fan the flames, ideally through the media and online forums.

The forums were only just beginning to rise, but their power to spread information was immeasurable.

Wang Yazhuo did not hesitate. She agreed at once.

Chen Fan asked me why I was doing this. I patted his shoulder. “You’ll understand in a while.”

He asked no further. Instead, he handed me the materials he had brought.

The autopsy report for the drunk man was already out, and I read through the forensic doctor’s findings. The back of the corpse’s head had indeed suffered a heavy blow, just like Wu Qingshan’s body had, but there was a difference. Wu Qingshan’s head had been struck several times in succession. The drunk man’s head had only been struck once.

The wound was not deep enough to kill him instantly, which meant that the expression of terror frozen on his face before death could not have been fixed there directly. Sure enough, I turned the page and kept reading. The cause of death listed by the forensic doctor was not the blow to the back of the head; after weighing all the evidence, the doctor concluded that the deceased had died of cardiac arrest.

In simple terms, it was sudden death.

Among all methods of dying short of having one’s skull completely crushed, this was one of the fastest ways to die. As for the body itself, the most eerie thing was the expression on the deceased’s face. The forensic team had also conducted a special examination of the facial muscles, and they found that the man’s mouth had been opened to the widest possible extent.

His facial muscles were also stretched taut.

At that point, I thought again of my earlier conclusion. That expression was absolutely one of shock. A person only makes such an exaggerated face in the instant of greatest terror; after that, no matter how frightened they may remain, the features do not stay quite so extreme.

Yet here lay a contradiction. Even if the drunk man died of sudden death, his muscles could not have stiffened immediately after death. That kind of expression should not have been able to remain fixed.

Chen Fan pointed at the photograph he had given me and said that it was simply too bizarre. The body had already been cleaned by the identification center, and even the hair had been shaved off.

The drunk man’s features stood out all the more starkly in the photograph: eyes round and staring, mouth agape.

That was indeed one of the suspicious points. The second was why the drunk man had died suddenly in the first place. Now that the man was dead, current forensic techniques still could not determine from the body whether he had suffered from any heart-related disease. But most people who die suddenly have some underlying ailment; otherwise, even if they are frightened beyond measure, the chance of dropping dead on the spot is not great.

The whites of the drunk man’s eyes were shot through with red veins, and the alcohol concentration detected in his body had reached a truly alarming level. Yet he had been able to move on his own at the time, which meant he had not been so drunk that he was unconscious. That, in turn, suggested that the extremely high alcohol level might have been because he had been drinking continuously for several days.

He had been in poor spirits, and the clothes on his body had not been changed for several days. In such cold weather, he had spent his days holed up in an underground parking garage drinking; all of this would increase the likelihood of sudden death. If he also had some heart problem, then sudden death was not impossible.

The expression on the drunk man’s face suggested that some external factor may have triggered his emotions, increasing the chance of sudden death.

“Brother Han, a lot of people are saying the drunk man saw something unclean, which is why he was scared to death,” Chen Fan said to me suddenly.

I nodded. “He may have seen a ghost.”

Chen Fan was astonished. “Brother Han, you think ghosts exist too? Haven’t you always refused to believe in them?”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe in them, but that doesn’t mean the drunk man didn’t. Did you forget the footsteps in that underground garage? That place is haunted too.”

The drunk man’s death and Wu Qingshan’s death had much in common. Both crime scenes were terrifying. The old house in the outskirts had long been rumored to be haunted; as for that underground garage, although the rumors had not yet spread, many people, including me, knew that the lights there often flickered on and off, and that there were footsteps growing closer and closer.

The crime scenes were similar, and the murderer’s methods were similar as well.

Whether it was Wu Qingshan or the drunk man, both had been struck hard in the back of the head. And at both scenes, a kumanthong had been found. The one discovered in the underground garage had, through trace comparison, already been confirmed as the weapon. The killer had used the kumanthong to smash the victims; that was the second similarity.

Chen Fan nodded, finding my reasoning sound, but he asked what good analyzing all this would do.

I smiled. “To understand the killer’s mindset.”

I tossed the autopsy report to Chen Fan and had him look at the depth of the wound at the back of the drunk man’s head. Although that wound was not enough to be immediately fatal, it was still enough to show that considerable force had been used. For an ordinary person, a blow like that to the back of the head would at least leave him dazed.

Needless to say, that drunk man was already intoxicated.

Chen Fan still did not understand me, but Wang Yazhuo was very quick-witted. She snapped, “Are you a police officer? How can you be this stupid? Fang Han means that if the killer had first smashed the drunk man’s head with that much force, the man would have fallen straight to the ground. Where would he have had the chance to see anything terrifying and then be frightened to death?”

Chen Fan finally saw the light. In the autopsy report, no conclusion had been made regarding whether the sudden death came before or after the blow to the back of the head. The reason was simple: the forensic doctor could not tell, because the two events were too close together in time.

The drunk man’s expression was very real. Genuine human expressions cannot be fabricated from the outside, so I was certain that his face had taken on that look only because he saw something he believed terrifying—and that thing was very likely what he believed to be a ghost. This was not an unfounded guess. Whether when we first met the drunk man or in the surveillance footage, he had always worn an expression of fear.

If the drunk man had suffered the blow to the back of the head before dying suddenly, that was possible. After all, sudden death is, at its core, an internal bodily function and does not necessarily require external fright. But if the drunk man did not die suddenly because his emotions were triggered, then he would not have produced such a genuine and exaggerated instant expression.

Just as Wang Yazhuo said, a blow of that force would have been enough to stun him, even knock him unconscious. Where, then, would he have gotten the chance to see anything frightening?

So the more likely sequence was that the drunk man died suddenly first, and only afterward was his head struck.

That raised a new question: since the drunk man had already collapsed dead, why would the killer still strike the back of his head so hard and leave a wound?

At first glance, the act seemed unnecessary. One must remember that blood would certainly have splashed out and stained the killer’s body, making it more likely that he would be found. If there were not some special purpose, the killer would not have done it.

At my question, Chen Fan frowned and thought carefully.

I stood up as well. “The killer deliberately made this case resemble Wu Qingshan’s death even more. That is the reason for what seems like an unnecessary blow.”

Both crime scenes were haunted. Both sites had kumanthongs. Both victims had been struck in the back of the head. These two cases were obviously linked. No other explanation could account for why the killer would add another blow to the back of the corpse’s head.

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