The Identity of the Girl Who Knocked

The Seventh Master's words had already left me somewhat numb.

The more we investigated, the more mysteries we uncovered.

The more problems we solved, the more trouble we stirred up.

We had no idea who the man from last night really was, or whether he was Lü Zhengxian's accomplice.

All we knew was that he knew a few tricks and was well versed in the occult. In any case, we had made an enemy of him.

Meng Yifan and I put away the talisman paper and started clearing up the things in the living room.

Halfway through, Meng Yifan seemed to find something.

"Chen Mo, look. What's this?"

He handed me a piece of wood.

It looked like a fragment that had splintered off something when it broke, and one side was painted dark red.

I turned it this way and that, but couldn't for the life of me imagine what the original object had been.

And it probably wasn't something the Seventh Master or Xiao Qing had brought.

"Where did you find it?" I asked Meng Yifan.

He pointed toward the doorway.

My expression changed. "The man who knocked the Seventh Master out last night might have dropped this."

He had kicked over the candles and command flags and tried to run, but I had reacted quickly enough to grab one of his legs.

Then he had fallen to the floor, right by the doorway.

I wondered whether his leg injury hadn't come from banging his knee after all, but from something in his trouser pocket digging into his thigh when he fell.

That object had broken in the fall, sending this piece of wood flying.

So it probably wasn't very big...

"Could it be a stamp?"

Meng Yifan's brain came back online. "Something small and wooden that could dig into his leg hard enough to hurt him like that? Sounds a lot like a stamp."

Now that he mentioned it, I suddenly thought it was a stamp too.

Whenever our office closed a deal, we had to stamp the contract, so we used them all the time. Looking at the piece of wood again, I became more and more convinced it had broken off a stamp.

"Let's put it away for now. It might come in handy later."

After putting away the piece of wood and finishing the cleanup, we left.

Once we were in the car, I hurriedly called Brother Liu and asked for his help again.

Over the phone, he also told us that he had found old ID photos of Li Xiumei and Lü Zhengxian. He would give them to us when we met for lunch.

There were still more than two hours until noon.

With nothing else to do and both of us desperately sleepy, Meng Yifan and I picked a massage parlor at random.

The two of us had a particular fondness for massages and bathhouses.

By the time we came out, we felt refreshed and full of energy.

Since Brother Liu had to work that afternoon, we skipped the fancy restaurants and found a decent little place nearby.

As we ate, Brother Liu handed us a thick document envelope.

There seemed to be a lot inside.

Meng Yifan and I lost all interest in the food and quickly emptied out its contents.

The first things we looked at were Li Xiumei's and Lü Zhengxian's ID photos, though they were only black-and-white photocopies.

Even so, we finally got to see what Li Xiumei looked like.

I had to admit, Li Xiumei was quite a beauty. Even an ID photo and a photocopy couldn't hide her natural good looks.

"Yours are black and white, but the ones I saw weren't. That dead broad was pretty hot."

Brother Liu grinned as he drank his soup.

Meng Yifan warned him, "Brother Liu, show her some respect. We only just saw her last night. Careful, or she might come looking for you."

Brother Liu froze as though he had swallowed a dead fly. He hunched his neck and fell silent.

Next, we looked at Lü Zhengxian's photo. Just as Xiao Qing had described, he had a square face.

But in black and white, we couldn't make out the large mole on his earlobe.

I asked Brother Liu, "The police identified Lü Zhengxian as the suspect in that family massacre fifteen years ago. How come they still haven't caught him?"

Brother Liu smiled. "Investigative techniques weren't as developed back then. There weren't so many surveillance cameras along the streets, and the DNA database wasn't comprehensive either. How were we supposed to catch him? All he had to do was get a fake ID. As long as he stayed out of trouble, who would bother with him? Who would know he was responsible for a family massacre?"

Meng Yifan asked curiously, "Over the past couple of years, I've seen the police catch plenty of criminals who'd been on the run for years just by checking IDs. How come they never found him?"

Brother Liu was a professional, so naturally he knew more than we did. He smiled. "You said it yourself: those were the ones they caught. Of course they're going to publicize their successes. There are plenty they haven't caught, and those are embarrassments. Who's going to air their failures for you lot to gossip about?"

"I'm telling you, there are loads of unsolved cases. Half the files piled up in the archives are old cold cases. Whether some of them ever get solved comes down entirely to luck."

"That doesn't mean we're incompetent, of course. We're not Sherlock Holmes, after all, right?"

Meng Yifan and I understood.

We were all only human. None of us had a few extra brains.

With the things we were dealing with now, even Sherlock Holmes would probably have to spend two nights listening to a ghost knock at the door first.

I asked Brother Liu, "In your seasoned opinion, can the police catch Lü Zhengxian this time?"

Brother Liu put down his chopsticks. When it came to his own field, he grew serious. "Not to brag, but I've handled a few major cases myself. Based on my experience, the police will definitely pull out all the stops to catch this dangerous man."

"And with current investigative technology, their chances of catching him will be much higher than before."

"But honestly, he's been on the run for so many years that there's no way the success rate can be one hundred percent. If they still can't catch him this time, I think there's a very good chance he's had plastic surgery. As long as he stays out of trouble and the police never collect his DNA, we might never catch him in our lifetime."

Plastic surgery...

I didn't ask any more questions. Brother Liu had already given us his professional opinion.

If catching Lü Zhengxian were really a sure thing, he wouldn't have raised the possibility of plastic surgery.

I quickly turned my attention to the thick stack of documents.

These were the cases I had asked Brother Liu to look into that morning: young women who had died in accidents over the past year.

I had narrowed the age range down to nineteen through twenty-two.

Brother Liu had found eighteen cases in total, eight of which involved university students.

I focused on those eight first. Each file contained detailed information about the deceased, along with photographs.

As it turned out, asking Brother Liu to look into all this hadn't been a waste at all.

I had found the girl who knocked at the door!

She was in one of the files, and she hadn't been dead for long-only three months!

"Boss Meng, look! It's her!"

I hurriedly handed the file to Meng Yifan.

Meng Yifan glanced at it and immediately swallowed hard.

Du Yuwei, female, twenty-one years old, a finance student at the Posts and Telecommunications University. She had died in a car accident three months earlier.

What shocked Meng Yifan and me even more was that Du Yuwei was the adopted daughter of Du Ruhai, a prominent businessman in Lanjiang City's real estate industry!