Chapter 195: The Mysterious Tailor’s Shop (2/2)

Bingxin sighed. “Not only do we have to solve the dismembered corpse case, but now we’ve got to find a serial killer too? Will we ever make it back in time for the New Year?”

“Well, you can experience New Year’s Eve like a police officer—eating instant noodles in the car while listening to the sound of fireworks and firecrackers,” answered Xiaotao.

Bingxin stuck out her tongue and cried, “No thanks!”

At that moment, we passed by a tailor’s shop, where I noticed a red dress hanging on the wall. I stopped in my tracks and stared at it. Xiaotao noticed this, and asked, “Should we go in and take a look?”

I nodded. We entered the tailor’s shop and found a woman hard at work at the sewing machine. She greeted us without even looking up at us. I signalled to Xiaotao not to show her police badge.

“Can you make a down jacket?” I asked the seamstress.

“Is it for you?” she asked.

“Yes!” I answered.

The seamstress got up and picked up a tape measure. I noticed that her face looked unusual for some reason. It seemed that half of her face was strangely stiff, and her eyelids were a little crooked. Noticing my gaze, she immediately lowered her head shyly as she came over to measure me.

“Have you had plastic surgery done on your face before?” Xiaotao asked.

The seamstress didn’t answer her, so Xiaotao added, “I’ve had it done before myself. It caused some complications though, and it nearly wrecked my face! It cost me a fortune to fix it! Even now I’m still feeling the effects from it! I’m allergic to everything now!”

That got the seamstress’s attention. “Where did you fix it?” she asked.

Xiaotao gave the name of a random hospital as an answer, then added, “You suffered complications from a plastic surgery too, don’t you?”

“Yes…” the seamstress replied meekly. “I made a bad choice of the hospital that time, and I suffered for it. I couldn’t even go out and meet people for a long time. Thankfully, it gradually got better after all these years.”

A man walked out of the back room and asked the seamstress, “Who are you talking too, Qin?”

“Just the customers,” the seamstress replied. “They’re ordering a down jacket.”

The man seemed to be her husband. His face was unremarkable, but he had a strong and muscular body. He eyed us up and down and asked, “You don’t sound like you’re from around here. What business do you have in this town?”

“Visiting relatives!” I answered.

The man nodded. “The town hasn’t been very safe lately. You people should be careful.”

I asked him their names, and the man handed me a business card. His name was Zhang Qiang, and his wife was Li Qin. I pointed at the red dress on the wall and asked, “Who would order that kind of dress these days?”

“Oh, that?” replied Zhang Qiang. “We couldn’t sell it for ages, so it stays there on the wall as a decoration of some sort…”

Xiaotao grabbed my arm and cooed, “It’s beautiful, darling! Would you buy it for me?”

I asked them the price, bought the dress, and we left the tailor’s shop.

Bingxin later asked, “Have you had plastic surgery before, Xiaotao-jiejie?”

“What a question!” Xiaotao feigned indignation. “Why would a natural beauty like me ever need plastic surgery? I was only pretending back there so we could tease out more information from them.”

Bingxin was shocked. “You mean you guys are suspecting the couple in the tailor’s shop?”

“Everyone is suspicious to the police,” Xiaotao replied.

We then returned to the police station. Xiaozhou had tested some trace components in the victim’s bone marrow. Xiaotao and Bingxin went back to work. Meanwhile, I asked Officer Chen to bring me the files of the serial murders.

I found that the victims of the four murders were all young and beautiful women. Hot cooking oil was used to disfigure them. When their bodies were found, they were wearing a red dress and there were traces of them being bound on their hands and feet. None of them had been sexually assaulted except for the fourth victim.

My gaze turned to the photo provided in the case files, where I noticed an alarming detail—the red dress that the first victim was wearing looked exactly like the one hanging on the wall of the tailor’s shop!

Previous ChapterNext Chapte