Ending in 9527

The municipal police headquarters, top floor, Conference Room One.

The blackout blinds had all been lowered. The room was dim.

Chen Lei stood at the head of the long table and pressed the next-slide button on his laser pointer.

The projection screen lit up.

The image was split into two halves.

On the left, Zhang Wei knelt in the lobby of People's Hospital, shouting at the crowd, "I'm guilty!"

On the right, Sun Ming snatched the microphone in the Grand Hyatt's banquet hall. His hoarse voice came through the speakers: "I drove Lin Xiao to his death.

I made him eat the chalk dust from a blackboard eraser..."

The two videos finished playing.

The image froze on the instant Sun Ming sliced open his carotid artery with broken glass, blood spraying out.

Eleven members of the municipal police Party committee sat on either side of the long table. No one spoke. The air was still.

"Five people." Chen Lei stopped the video and opened a slideshow.

"Zhao Gang, Wang Hu, Zhang Wei, Liu Qiang, Sun Ming.

Different professions, different social classes. They had two things in common.

First, they were all abusers who had escaped legal punishment.

Second, their causes of death were remarkably consistent. In every case, the primary fatal factor was acute coronary artery occlusion or complications arising from it."

Chen Lei braced both hands on the table and swept his gaze across the room.

"This isn't a coincidence.

It's a premeditated series of purges with specific targets.

The killer has some lethal method we currently don't understand.

Forensic examiner Lao Liu's reexamination report explicitly states that the victims' hearts were subjected to pressure beyond their physical limits in the instant before death."

At the head of the table, Deputy Director Wang picked up his teacup and took a sip of tea that had gone completely cold.

"The Provincial Department's directive placing this case under its supervision arrived in my internal inbox ten minutes ago."

Wang set down his cup, his voice low. "The Municipal Party Committee leadership called my direct line.

The internet is flooded with posts turning this killer into a god. Public opinion is out of control."

Wang stood and planted both hands on the table.

"Effective immediately, we are formally establishing the November 2 Major Serial Unexplained Deaths Task Force.

Chen Lei, you're in charge. Criminal investigation, technical investigation, cyber surveillance, video investigation-every resource in the city is to be made available to the task force without condition.

I don't care whether we're dealing with a human or a ghost. Within two weeks, I want to see a suspect sitting in an interrogation room."

Chen Lei stood at attention and saluted.

"Yes, sir."

The large command center on the third floor.

Dozens of computer screens flickered. The clatter of keyboards merged into a dense patter of rain.

Chen Lei pulled over a mobile whiteboard, picked up a marker, and wrote five locations on it.

Splendid Garden. Intime Department Store.

People's Hospital. Yunzhou City Bathhouse. Grand Hyatt.

He crossed out Yunzhou City. It was too far away to be useful for the local investigation.

"Access headquarters' Skynet big-data system."

Chen Lei turned and issued instructions to the technical investigation chief.

"Pull all surveillance-camera footage and cell-tower signal data for the remaining four locations from the forty-eight hours before each incident."

The technical investigation chief's hands flew across the keyboard, sweat forming on his forehead.

"Captain Chen, the data pool is too large.

Across those four high-traffic areas, more than two million people passed through within forty-eight hours.

Our servers don't have enough processing power. They'll crash."

"Connect to the municipal government cloud center. Use the highest authorization level to access its idle computing capacity."

Chen Lei's tone brooked no argument.

"Set the screening criteria: exclude static IP addresses belonging to permanent residents and isolate movement between cell towers.

Cross-reference movement patterns across these four areas.

Find anyone who appeared at three or more of the locations."

The technical investigation chief hit Enter.

A progress bar appeared on the central display. Red numbers began changing wildly.

The server fans roared.

Changfeng Road, Linhai City.

Kannazuki sat astride his electric scooter, parked in the shade of a roadside tree. He held a shriveled pork-stuffed flatbread.

The tablet in his backpack vibrated continuously at a low frequency.

Kannazuki swallowed his food. He unzipped his backpack and took out the tablet.

On the screen, the surveillance-node management program running in the background of Tor Browser was frantically issuing alerts.

The backdoor into the Skynet surveillance system he had bought for 0.05 Bitcoin showed that traffic on police headquarters' backbone network had shot almost vertically upward over the past five minutes.

The spike led straight to the municipal government cloud's computing center.

Kannazuki's gaze turned cold.

The police were running big-data analysis.

Only cross-referencing enormous volumes of movement data could produce throughput on this scale. Chen Lei was moving faster than he had expected.

Kannazuki opened the backend of his delivery app on his phone and tapped his delivery-route history.

He began reviewing it.

Zhao Gang's case: Splendid Garden. He rented a place in the neighboring block and frequently passed through.

Zhang Wei's case: People's Hospital. He had been in the second-floor lobby at the time.

Sun Ming's case: Grand Hyatt.

Although he had never gone inside, an hour before the incident he had delivered food to the Imperial View Bay villa complex where Sun Ming lived, and had made direct contact with him at the villa's back entrance.

Three overlapping locations.

Among a population numbering in the millions, very few ordinary people would have intersecting routes at these unrelated locations.

The big-data sieve only needed a few shakes before he fell out of the sand, fully exposed to Chen Lei.

Kannazuki watched the traffic waveform on the tablet screen.

Shut down and go offline now? Hide back in the rental?

No.

Within a massive data stream, a node that suddenly went silent stood out most. Running would be as good as exposing himself.

The best way to hide a tree was in a forest.

The best way to hide a route was to create countless more complicated ones.

Kannazuki opened the delivery app's settings.

He disabled smart dispatch and manually changed his delivery range from within three kilometers to citywide, unrestricted.

He opened the available-orders page.

The screen was filled with long-distance, cross-district orders no one wanted.

Shopping request: buy two roast ducks from a longstanding shop in the south of the city and deliver them to the northern high-tech district. Distance: 25 kilometers.

Errand: collect a medical examination report from the central hospital and deliver it to the western suburban logistics park. Distance: 18 kilometers.

Kannazuki tapped repeatedly, accepting five long-distance, cross-district orders in one go.

He stuffed the tablet back into his backpack, put on his yellow helmet, and lowered the black visor.

He twisted the throttle.

The electric scooter shot into traffic on the main road.

He would use relentless physical movement to turn his GPS trail into a completely irregular tangle.

He would dilute those three fatal overlaps with an enormous volume of redundant data.

The command center.

The progress bar on the large screen reached one hundred percent.

"Comparison complete!" the technical investigation chief shouted, exhaustion in his voice.

"Across the four locations, we've identified 3,124 transient individuals whose routes overlapped three or more times within forty-eight hours."

Chen Lei strode up to the screen.

More than three thousand people.

Out of a base of two million, that number was already highly precise.

But it still exceeded what they could investigate individually by manpower alone.

"Classify those three thousand people by occupation," Chen Lei ordered.

The large screen changed to a bar chart.

The three bars on the far left towered over the rest, accounting for eighty-five percent of the total.

The technical investigation chief studied the data. "Couriers, food delivery riders, ride-hailing drivers.

Captain Chen, those three professions naturally travel all over the city. Their routes overlap heavily. They're inevitable noise in big-data analysis.

The system has trouble distinguishing them from ordinary residents."

Chen Lei stared at the tallest bar, labeled "Food delivery riders."

The flash of yellow clothing he had glimpsed in the second-floor lobby of the city hospital crossed his mind again.

"They're not noise." Chen Lei's voice was low, his gaze sharp.

"The killer needs to gather information, confirm what his targets look like, and perhaps even observe their deaths at close range.

He needs a plausible identity that lets him appear anywhere, at any time, without arousing suspicion."

Chen Lei turned to face the entire task force.

"A uniform is the best cloak of invisibility. Focus on food delivery riders."

"Extract every delivery worker from those three thousand people.

Contact the city's three major food delivery platforms and obtain detailed order records for those individuals during the times of the incidents."

"Prioritize anyone who stopped near Splendid Garden, People's Hospital, or the Grand Hyatt for more than ten minutes.

I want all their verified identity information."

Night fell.

Rain washed the streets of Linhai City.

Kannazuki parked his electric scooter outside the security office at the western suburban logistics park.

He took off his soaked raincoat and handed a medical examination report to the security guard.

"Number ending in 9527. Your errand delivery."

The guard took the document, glanced at Kannazuki's mud-spattered trouser legs, and muttered, "Coming all this way. You're working yourself to death."

Kannazuki said nothing.

He turned and walked back to his scooter.

That afternoon, he had crossed five administrative districts in Linhai City and traveled nearly a hundred and thirty kilometers.

His route now covered more than half the city.