Chapter 083: Shaping Expressions, Acting in Haste

At first, I wondered whether the killer had feared the drunk man might not yet be dead and so struck him again. But after thinking it through, I immediately rejected that theory. When the victim died, he must have been lying on his back, or at least on his side, but certainly not face down. The reason was simple: there were no injuries on the front of his body, especially none on his face.

If the drunk man had collapsed forward at the moment of sudden death and ended up face down on the floor, there would have been some trace of scraping. The surface of the underground garage was rough, and even the slightest abrasion could be identified by a forensic examiner.

And if he had been lying on his side or on his back, then, judging from the position of the wound on the back of his head, the killer would first have had to expose the entire rear of the skull before using the child figure left at the scene to strike him there. If the killer was merely worried the victim might not be fully dead, there was no need to go to such trouble. There are far too many fatal points on the front of the human body.

So the blow to the back of the head was clearly deliberate.

One could imagine the scene: the victim had already died and was lying on the ground, and the killer turned the body over, then delivered another blow to the back of the skull.

But according to Chen Fan, when the police found the body, it had been lying on its back. That meant the corpse had been turned more than once. Chen Fan was completely baffled. He cursed, "Was the killer playing with the corpse? He turned it over, struck again, and then after smashing the head, turned it back over. What was he trying to do?"

"To shape the victim's expression," I said.

The gradual analysis had already given me a clearer direction.

Chen Fan countered, "Brother Han, an expression can't be forged from the outside. That's what you said."

I nodded. "Neither by pinching it with your hands nor by any other means can you make a corpse wear such a real expression. But fixing or amplifying an expression that has already formed is very easy."

After striking the back of the victim's head, the killer did not leave at once. Instead, he turned the body over again, placing it in the supine position in which the police later found it. Usually, after killing someone, once the killer has made sure no traces were left behind, he will flee quickly rather than stop to rearrange the corpse.

Clearly, the second turning of the body was also intentional.

The killer wanted the drunk man's death to bear more similarities to Wu Qingshan's death. Yet in truth, the two bodies were very different. Wu Qingshan's face had been completely ruined, while the drunk man's face remained intact. I was certain that if there had been enough time, the killer would have done to the drunk man exactly what he had done to Wu Qingshan and cut away every feature of his face.

Chen Fan asked why the killer wanted the two cases to seem so alike. I smiled and asked him, "What was your first instinct when you heard about the first case?"

Chen Fan thought for a moment. Whether from the cold or from fear, he shivered and answered, "It felt like Wu Qingshan was killed by the child spirit."

He was not the only one who felt that way. Especially after it was confirmed that Wu Qingshan had helped a female star maintain the child spirit, even more people came to that conclusion. And with that haunted old house, with child spirits piled up like mountains, and with Wu Qingshan dying in such a horrifying way, it was no wonder.

"Exactly," I said. "The killer racked his brains to make the second case resemble the first as much as possible, because he wanted to link the crime to the child spirit's backlash."

This was yet another person who wanted to create a headless supernatural mystery.

Based on the killer's psychology, he would create even more similarities to the first case. The drunk man's face had not been mutilated only because the killer had no time to cut away his features.

"I can't tell whether this killer is clever or stupid," I told Chen Fan. "He didn't do everything to the body that was done to Wu Qingshan's, but he still tampered with the drunk man's face a little."

By the time I reached this point in the analysis, I had already understood why the victim, even after death, could have such an exaggerated instant expression frozen on his face. The killer's second turning of the body was precisely to fix and magnify the terrified look that had appeared just before death.

After death, the muscles remain relaxed. Before the drunk man suddenly died, his eyes and mouth should indeed have been wide open. But without external assistance, that expression could not have been preserved; at the very least, his mouth would not have stayed stretched to its maximum. One could imagine the killer turning the drunk man over after death and, with his hands, forcing the eyes and mouth to remain open while also stretching the facial muscles.

In winter, rigor mortis sets in more quickly. Even so, the killer must have stayed beside the body for at least several dozen minutes.

By the time he left, the expression on the face had already been fixed by rigor mortis.

After hearing this, Chen Fan was somewhat surprised. "He stayed that long? Wasn't he afraid someone would discover him?"

"He was afraid," I said. "That's why the lights in the underground garage were off when he committed the crime."

The person who found the body said that when he drove into the garage, the lights were not on, and they only came on shortly before the police arrived. Those lights in the garage may have been part of the killer's trick as well.

Late at night, there are very few people who would go to a parking garage. The underground garage was quiet. If anyone went in, the killer could tell by the sound. With the lights off, even if someone entered, he would be less likely to be noticed. Before the body was discovered, he could easily have found a chance to slip away unnoticed.

The killer had absolutely already mapped out the underground garage, so moving through it in the dark would not have posed much difficulty. The footsteps we heard were, most likely, also deliberately made by him. His aim was to create yet another haunted murder scene. Yet we found no one, which was enough to show how familiar he was with the underground garage.

The child sat on Wang Yazhuo's lap, her chin resting on the child's head. They both looked rather endearing.

Wang Yazhuo also knew a great deal about the case. Whether she found it amusing or truly wanted to help me, she set the child aside on the sofa and joined Chen Fan and me in the discussion.

"Could the killer have murdered the second person to deepen the mystery of the first case, making it even harder for the police to solve?" Wang Yazhuo guessed.

I did not hesitate. "Impossible."

Wang Yazhuo asked why.

"In the first case, there wasn't a single clue at the scene that could reveal the killer's identity. If he only wanted to make the first case more mysterious by way of the second, there would have been no need at all. Besides, even if it were as you said, the killer would have needed careful planning. But don't you think this second case is somewhat hasty compared with the first?"

My words plunged both Wang Yazhuo and Chen Fan into thought. I called the second case hasty because the killer had not, as in the first case, removed the victim's facial features. If the killer truly intended, as I suspected, to pin the case on the child spirit, the best method would have been to create a body exactly like the one in the first crime.

But he had not done that.

A serial murder could have been driven by a twisted mind, or by a desire to challenge the authority of the law. Yet the relative haste of the second case ruled out both possibilities in my view.

When the police had found no trace to follow, if the killer truly wanted to strike again, he would have had ample time to prepare. Instead, he acted in haste, and there was only one possibility: he could not allow the drunk man to live any longer.

Chen Fan snapped his fingers. "Could it be that the drunk man knew something, something that might expose the killer's identity?"

I nodded. "Right now I suspect that our having seen the drunk man hastened his death."

The killer's rush did not mean this was a spur-of-the-moment crime. The haunting in that underground garage had been going on for some time, and it was obvious the killer had been preparing for a long time. But that preparation may not yet have been complete. Not long after we, as police, discovered the drunk man, the murder took place.

There would be no such coincidence. The killer may have already been planning to kill the drunk man, but our appearance likely threw him into panic.

If our speculation was all true, then determining the drunk man's identity became all the more necessary.