Chapter 7: The Case from Ten Years Ago (1/2)

Officer Sun told me that it happened ten years before. At the time, he was still only the captain of a crime scene investigation team. He climbed all the way up to his high position now, and it was all thanks to Grandpa.

Grandpa was a remarkable person, said Officer Sun. He would not bother getting involved in any trivial cases, and it would take much persuasion to convince him to help the police. But once he was involved, it was basically guaranteed that the case was as good as solved!

It all began on a dark, moonless night. At the time Officer Sun was at the provincial police headquarters to deliver some important documents. A middle-aged man suddenly walked in carrying a plastic bag in his hand. He was wobbling and unstable on his feet, and his face was red like he was drunken. The moment he got in he shouted and pleaded for help, saying someone was trying to kill him. But just as he uttered his sentence, he fell splat on the floor.

Officer sun thought he was just a drunken passed out on the floor, but when he went over to check the man’s breathing, he realized that he was already dead.

Officer Sun opened the plastic bag in the deceased’s hand, and lo and behold! It was a human heart inside!

There were no injuries or wounds on the victim’s body, he looked just as if he fell asleep. Neither were there any signs of struggle or of poisoning. In other words, the victim simply parked his car outside of the police station, got out of the car while the engine was still on, and died at the police station. Apart from his own fingerprints, none other was found in the car.

The police checked his background and found that he was an esteemed judge working in the city.

Because of that, the higher-ups in the police organization made solving this case a high priority. They arranged for the best police officers and forensic scientists and coroners to work on the case, forming a special task force that would comb through every available clue. But weeks passed and no results were gained, and the investigation went nowhere. Even the exact cause of death was not totally understood.

The truth was that the task force was made up of people who were more eager to move up the rungs of the organization than they were to solve the case. In the meetings, for example, each of them was more concerned with being the one who got it right, no one was listening to anyone else’s suggestions, and they all worked individually and separately with no real teamwork at all.

Officer Sun was one of the most junior members of the task force, so when he first suggested contacting Grandpa to help them with the case, everyone laughed and mocked him, saying to hire an out of date Traditional Coroner like that, why not just ask a fortune teller to try to look for the murderer through the crystal ball?

Just then, the second case happened. This time the victim was a woman. She was a rich businesswoman who had just returned from abroad.

And just like the first victim, the police found a plastic bag near her body that contained a human heart.

Because there was absolutely no progress in the investigation, Officer Sun decided to go rogue and bring Grandpa in to help despite objections from his colleagues. Grandpa agreed, but just as Officer Sun took him to the police station, they discovered that the bodies had been dissected for autopsies.

The coroner had dissected the bodies and examined every inch of them, but all they found out was that the heart in the plastics bags belonged to the victims themselves. The murderer used a mysterious method that was able to extract the organ without damaging or leaving any damages on the body at all.

Grandpa told Officer Sun that there’s nothing he could do with this case any more, because there was one non-negotiable condition for him in order to co-operate with the police – and that was that no one must be allowed to touch the dead bodies before he did.

Officer Sun used all his abilities to persuade Grandpa to keep on working with the police, eventually Grandpa suggested that they went to the victim’s house to find some clues.

The victim’s house had already been searched through plenty of times. But apart from the footprints and fingerprints of the forensic team, absolutely nothing was found. If there was one thing that could be said of this serial murderer, it was the word thorough!

Criminal motives, killing method, evidence left at the crime scenes, none of this could be found out at all, and it seemed that the murderer knew exactly how to get rid of clues towards finding them out so that the police were left completely in the dark!

But Grandpa was no ordinary man. Once they’d reached the crime scene, he covered all the blinds and curtains of the windows, then lit up a bunch of dried wormwood until the smoke filled up the whole house. Then, from the fog of smoke the words appear on the wall – Jiangbei Daggers, Protect the People, Condemn the Corrupt!

Jiangbei Daggers was probably the name the serial murderer gave himself. And it seemed that he believed himself to be acting in the people’s benefit by eradicating the powerful corrupt people from society! Officer Sun rushed back to the police headquarters to retrieve the victim’s information. It turned out that the first victim, the judge, had received bribes and judged two innocent men to be guilty of murder. The other victim, the businesswoman, had invested in the pharmaceutical industry and had sold a cancer drug that cost ten yuan originally to be sold at an exhorting price of a few thousand yuan, getting rich on the pain of patients.