Chapter 64: The Case of the Hammer Demon (Part 33)

The office ceiling fan was thick with dust, its blades spinning like three rusted guillotines.

Lei Chen kicked a half-empty box of instant noodles aside and said angrily, "The snow is thinnest at the southeast corner of the low wall, and the glass shards on top of the wall were padded with a cotton-padded jacket."

Suddenly, he picked up a case file and slammed it down on a green-bottle fly, "The perpetrator walked into the door like it was his own home, and used a frozen, pickled radish to pry the door latch."

Outside the window, sleet pattered against the rain awning. Qi Wei was sealing the evidence box in the corridor. "Captain Lei, will Forensic Doctor Li and Director Wen be alright at the crime scene?"

"Extremely unlikely," Lei Chen sighed helplessly and shook his head. "I've been a criminal police officer for all these years, and this is the first time I've encountered something like this."

"What can we do about it? The old folks are stuck in their traditional ways."

Lei Chen suddenly laughed out loud. "And the most absurd part? We've become headless flies, and the boss was called away to 'drink tea'!"

Chen Ying's transcribed testimony curled up against the radiator, its third page stained with dried egg-drop soup.

"How long before the DNA results come out for the hair found on the girl's body?" Li Rui asked.

"If we're fast, it should be ready before nine," Qi Wei replied.

"The transport vehicle flipped twice on the way to the lab," Lei Chen said, picking at the dried blood under his fingernail with a ballpoint pen refill. "The evidence bag rolled seventeen meters down the snowbank, and that single hair got wrapped up in the anti-skid chain of a coal truck."

Abruptly, he lifted a magnifying glass toward the window, where a Yu-P-registered tanker truck was crushing frozen brake tracks on the provincial highway.

When the success chime of the database match rang out, the steam from the duty room's instant noodles fogged the windowpane—the DNA helix of that stray hair looked precisely like the brake cable of the decommissioned motorcycle in the police warehouse.

Lei Chen cursed, "That bastard!"

The Biluochun tea in the thermos had long since gone cold. The curled hair inside the evidence bag cast an eerie blue sheen under polarized light, lining up with previous samples in the database like a string of death codes.

The moonlight transformed the morgue shed into a pale, ghostly lantern.

A crust of ice had formed over the crotch of the dead girl's cotton trousers. As gentle tweezers plucked the curled hair, ice shards dripped downward from the autopsy table.

At that exact moment, the morgue's freezer tripped its circuit breaker, and the frozen soil in Chen Ying's grandson's palm began to thaw. Mixed in the mud was half a fingernail-sized piece of cellophane candy wrapper, the exact packaging of the sesame-butter crisp candies that sold best at the temple fair.

Li Rui walked out of the iron-sheet shack; moss still clung to the tip of the old man's walking stick from his son's doorstep. "My old lady and I went to watch the house for them, and feed their livestock along the way."

"When I walked into the eastern room by the moonlight, I felt my way to my granddaughter's bed. I reached out and touched an arm—her whole body was cold. I rushed out to shout for help and called the police."

Looking down at his dead son and then gathering the corpse of his small grandson in his arms, the old man wept as he spoke, "Child, you were only nine years old, just starting the second grade, still at an age where you wanted to play—why did such a disaster have to befall you?"

At two in the morning in the criminal investigation squad's corridor, the voice-activated lights flickered and convulsed like a Parkinson's patient. Lei Chen carried a plastic bag glistening with the oil of braised meat, while Qi Wei held a thermal container wafting the scent of scallions, looking remarkably rebellious beneath the "No Smoking" sign.

"Surprise, bringing you some warmth," Lei Chen kicked open the door of the iron shack with his toe. Li Rui's snoring was leaking out from the cracks of the morgue cabinets. He tossed the plastic bag next to the microscope, a braised pig's trotter pressing down on half of a DNA identification report.

Qi Wei placed the thermal container on the bloodstain analyzer, the steam fogging the glass cover. "Gentle Doctor, Aunt Wang from the cafeteria specifically saved these wontons, saying you night owls are going to perforate your stomachs sooner or later."

She glanced at the three empty noodle boxes piled in the corner, the smiling face of the Master Kong mascot on the cartons branded into a cyclops by cigarette butts.

Lei Chen was picking up a piece of braised dried tofu with tweezers when he suddenly noticed that a hair sample in the evidence bag was missing. "Damn it, you definitely used it as a toothpick."

A dull thud suddenly came from the autopsy table as Li Rui rolled over and knocked a formaldehyde bottle onto its side. Seizing the opportunity, Qi Wei poured the wontons into a beaker—after all, this thing was cleaner than the cafeteria bowls. Lei Chen pulled out a pack of Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes, the pack still smeared with chili powder from the night market barbecue stall.

"You know what the most bizarre thing about this case is?" Lei Chen blew a smoke ring, the ash dropping into the thermal container. "Before committing the crime, the killer bought an iron hammer in town, and the stamp on the receipt says 'Zhaocai Hardware Store'."

He suddenly chuckled, "Zhaocai [Attracting Wealth]? Summoning ghosts is more like it."

A fine drizzle began to fall outside the window, police cruiser roof lights casting red and blue patches across the puddles. Startled awake by the aroma of wontons, Li Rui watched as Lei Chen used an evidence bag to hold braised food while Qi Wei dried scallions on the fingerprint scanner. The morgue's chilled air mingled with the scent of braised meat, glossing the slogan "Murder Cases Must Be Solved" to a greasy shine.

Li Rui sat up. "What on earth are you guys doing? Eating Tang Monk meat?!"

"This time, the perpetrator chose to commit the crime at the intersection of two provinces and three counties. He exploited another blind spot of ours, knowing that police intelligence from our side has to be reported level by level up to Anhui Province. That gives him plenty of time," Lei Chen analyzed between bites of braised tofu.

Li Rui snatched a piece of braised tofu. "Before the Anhui police can react, he has to escape the perimeter they might set up, otherwise it'll be hard to get away."

"Therefore, he'll keep running toward Xincai," Lei Chen stood up. "Once he reaches Xincai, he'll loop back around. So, his next stop is—"

"Fangyang!" Li Rui and Lei Chen spoke in unison.

On the 25th, the forensic pathologist finished the examination and packed up to leave.

Before parting, Gentle urged the two old folks to take care of themselves.

The old man replied, "The children are all gone, and left all by myself as an old woman, I don't want to live anymore. What meaning is there for me to live on alone?"

Gentle paused, wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, pulled a thousand yuan from her pocket, and shoved it into the old woman's hand. "Granny, you must gather the courage to go on living. We will come back to see you in the future. Even though your children are gone, we are all your children."

The police car was about to move. Chen Ying slowly released her grip on the police officer's hand. She watched the officers, who were waving repeatedly at her, walk away into the distance, then sat down at the village entrance and wept once more.

The taillights of the police cruiser crushed a puddle at the village entrance, the splashing mud droplets mimicking the spatter bloodstains gathered at the crime scene. Li Rui, biting down on half a piece of braised tofu, was suddenly choked by the spicy chili oil and coughed. In the rearview mirror, Han Fengying's hunched figure shrank into a black dot in the twilight, like a rusted thumbtack pinned into the provincial boundary marker.

"Something's wrong." Li Rui slammed the steering wheel, sending the police car into a drift across the muddy road. "That bastard understands the loopholes of cross-provincial pursuit too well."

He fished out a cigarette, the lighter flame flickering unsteadily amid the bumps. "The provincial highway from Xiping to Fangyang is under construction, the surveillance cameras are completely blind."

Lei Chen was flipping through the weather forecast on his phone, the screen's blue light casting a sickly hue over his face. "There's a torrential downpour forecast for Xiping tomorrow night, just enough to wash away footprints."

A sudden thought struck him, and he pulled an evidence bag from his pocket containing the shopping receipt from the Miaoqian Town hardware store. "This son of a bitch specifically asked for a receipt when buying the hammer, almost as if he was... leaving a marker."

Gentle was wiping her camera lens in the back seat when she suddenly chimed in, "Granny Han said that three days before the case, a peddler came to the entrance of the village."

She pulled up a blurry surveillance screenshot. "Even though he was wearing a mask, there was a scar on his right earlobe. I suspect—"

Her words were cut off by a sudden crack of thunder as dark clouds in the distance pressed down upon the provincial border.

As the police car plunged into the curtain of rain, Li Rui caught a glimpse of the words "Ping'an Hardware" on a roadside billboard illuminated blindingly white by a flash of lightning.

Meanwhile, in the old streets of Xiping, a black cat slipped through a hole in the wall of Niu Zhanwei's house, its emerald eyes glowing like twin ghost fires in the rainy night. The old scholar tree in the courtyard was whipped wildly by the wind, casting tree shadows onto the main room's windowpane that resembled an open hand, waiting to seize its next prey.