41. Hair

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Jin Ze’s penetrating analysis and confident explanation gave me a little more faith as well. He was right. With so many clues laid out before us, there had to be a way to solve the case.

We left my house and stepped into the courtyard, where we happened to see the corpse of the woman whose uterus Bai Ye had cut out, along with the decapitated body of the killer, Chen Mu, being carried away.

Miao Miao had just finished a preliminary examination. The moment she saw Jin Ze and me, she came over.

But when she saw me, she instinctively slowed her steps. That was understandable. She had just examined a corpse identical to me, and even the boldest person would have found that unsettling.

Jin Ze quickly asked, “Miao Miao, what is it? Did you find anything?”

Miao Miao answered directly, “The female victim died only recently. The fatal injury was a severed carotid artery. There are also multiple wounds on her body, which matches what you described earlier. It was murder, and she was subjected to brutal interrogation.”

Jin Ze nodded and told her to continue. He knew she had more to say. That was merely a basic autopsy report, hardly something she would need to explain to him.

Miao Miao suddenly turned and gave me a strange look before saying to Jin Ze, “What I mainly wanted to discuss is the male corpse. Something about it is wrong.”

Jin Ze said, “Just tell us directly. Chen Mu is now a reserve member of our Cold Case Unit, so there is no need to hide anything from him.”

Only then did Miao Miao speak. “My preliminary assessment is that this man has been dead for more than a year. However, his body was coated with a special preservative, so it neither decayed nor dried out, and the corpse has been preserved relatively well.”

What Miao Miao said matched what Fang Qinghe had told us earlier. It seemed certain that this corpse really was that of the killer Chen Mu. Still, we would need to compare his DNA with mine before we could make a final determination.

But what exactly was wrong with it? Why had Miao Miao singled it out?

While I was puzzling over this, her next words made my heart leap into my throat.

She continued, “Although the male corpse was coated with a special preservative, when I dissected it just now, I discovered that some of the flesh and organs inside had begun to decay, especially…”

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Miao Miao paused before continuing. “Especially the organs of the reproductive system. The decay is far more advanced than I could have imagined. They have all turned into mush. If the body had not been treated with such a powerful preservative, the entire corpse would probably have deteriorated and fallen apart in sheets, just like Lu Qiang and the drug-addicted woman from the KTV.”

At that, my heart gave a violent jolt. A terrifying tension instantly settled over me, and Miao Miao’s next sentence transformed that tension into sheer horror.

She said, “The decay in the male corpse may have begun only within the past few days. Normally, even when a corpse decays, the process starts gradually and worsens over a long period of time. It is highly unusual for a body to remain intact for one or two years and then suddenly begin to rot. Perhaps it was removed from some special storage equipment and exposed to oxidation, but the decay began in certain internal organs. That leads me to suspect that some kind of virus had been lying dormant inside him and suddenly emerged after the incubation period.”

“If that is truly the case, the virus would be extraordinarily dangerous. Unlike HIV, which rapidly loses its ability to survive once it leaves a living host, this virus might possess other powerful means of transmission even if it cannot spread through the air. I recommend that this male corpse, along with the other two similar corpses, be cremated as soon as possible.”

After hearing Miao Miao’s analysis, even the usually composed Jin Ze could not help frowning. He told her to contact Fang Qinghe, arrange for the bodies to be cremated, and have everyone who had come into contact with them professionally disinfected and medically examined.

I was completely stunned, my heart turning cold. It seemed that the baby-swapping operation had truly begun to take effect. Could I be carrying the virus too? Was I about to start rotting as well?

The thought made my entire body itch unbearably. I scratched my arm, and a patch of red immediately appeared, making me even more anxious.

Jin Ze gave me a helpless look, then scratched his own arm and said, “Stop frightening yourself. Look at me. I turn red when I scratch myself too. These are only suspicions. We are taking precautions. You are perfectly fine.”

I nodded. We then left my hometown and returned to the police station. Only after I had undergone professional disinfection did I go looking for Jin Ze.

In the brief half hour that had passed, Jin Ze had already made a new breakthrough.

He searched the population database for the name Huang Quan. Although it was a rather pleasant name, it was not commonly used because it sounded like the phrase “Yellow Springs.” Even so, there were still a great many entries. Jin Ze remembered that the finger-eating female corpse had flown in from Jiangsu. If she had truly come to meet an old lover, then Huang Quan was likely from either our city or hers. In the end, Jin Ze narrowed the search down to several suspicious individuals.

After carefully screening them by age, he actually found a Huang Quan whose date of birth matched mine. He was also from the same city as the finger-eating female corpse. Unfortunately, his identification photograph had not been updated in many years. It was still a picture from his childhood, which explained why Fang Qinghe and the others had failed to find him when searching for images of the killer Chen Mu.

The most encouraging news was that Huang Quan’s childhood photograph matched mine. This confirmed Jin Ze’s earlier deduction: I really was one of identical triplets, and another of my brothers was named Huang Quan. The only question was whether, unlike Chen Mu, he had been deliberately placed in this conspiracy more than twenty years ago. But now that he had become involved, he was probably a pawn just like me.

Since we had located Huang Quan’s population records, we naturally found his family as well. We decided to monitor his parents as soon as possible, while taking care not to alert anyone.

As soon as Jin Ze had secured this crucial lead, more good news arrived. Fang Qinghe brought us another important development.

The identity of the woman whose uterus Bai Ye had removed had also been confirmed. Coincidentally, she was from S City as well, meaning that she, the finger-eating female corpse, and Huang Quan were all registered in the same city. That could not be a coincidence. It had to have been deliberate. Either she and the finger-eating female corpse had been working together, or she had been keeping watch on the other woman.

Fang Qinghe followed that lead and, sure enough, discovered that the woman whose uterus had been removed had arrived in our city on the same flight as the finger-eating female corpse.

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Finally, we reviewed the footage from Sunshine KTV once again. Now that we had a target, we quickly spotted the woman whose uterus had been removed. She entered the KTV after Huang Quan had left. The time between her entry and departure matched the time of the finger-eating female corpse’s death exactly.

In the end, we arrived at the following conclusion: Huang Quan had come to our city to carry out a mission against Dawn of Destruction and the Avengers Alliance. Before accepting that mission, he had had a girlfriend—or perhaps a lover on the side. That lover was the finger-eating female corpse.

Huang Quan’s superior, or whoever stood behind him, must have known about his personal relationships. After learning that this lover had come to meet him, they decided to kill her so that she would not interfere with his mission. The killer was the woman whose uterus had been removed.

The decision to make the finger-eating female corpse die in a manner resembling infection by that terrifying virus was probably intended as a warning to Huang Quan: the mission came first, or he might meet the same fate.

Everything had been arranged both to warn Huang Quan and to remain completely undetectable. It might even have caused us to fear the existence of that terrifying virus. But then the ghostlike Bai Ye appeared out of nowhere. He traced the woman whose uterus had been removed, found the coded case through her, and killed her. In an instant, the entire trail was exposed before the eyes of the police.

We soon discovered the woman’s hotel registration in our city. She had not yet checked out. Bai Ye might have visited the room, but that did not necessarily mean there was no useful information left behind. We immediately decided to search it, while conducting the operation in secret so as not to alert anyone.

Jin Ze and I were responsible for the search. By the time we left the police station, it was already late at night. I was a little hungry, and when I spotted a nearby vendor selling my favorite meat-stuffed flatbreads, I went over and bought one. Jin Ze did not want any, so I ate it myself.

We soon arrived at the hotel. I wondered whether the meat in the flatbread had gone bad, because as soon as I reached the room occupied by the woman whose uterus had been removed, I suddenly developed a stomachache and hurried to borrow the bathroom.

I had barely pulled down my trousers and sat on the toilet when I felt a chill against my backside, as though someone were breathing on me from inside the bowl.

At first I paid no attention. Then my skin suddenly tingled again, as if something had grabbed me.

I instinctively stood up and turned around. At the sight before me, I nearly lost my soul.

The toilet had been perfectly normal just moments earlier, but now a large mass of hair was spilling from it. The strands had spread across the bowl, and beneath them it seemed as though a human head were soaking in the water.

I was about to call for Jin Ze when I caught sight of a shadow near the edge of the toilet. It looked as if someone were standing behind me—or even crouching over my back.

At that very moment, a thick lock of hair suddenly coiled around my face…