Chapter Ten: Family Annihilation

Ning Shuyi took note of the elderly couple and saw that both of them were wearing house clothes and only slippers on their feet. They looked rather different from the others, so they must be residents of this unit.

And so, under Ning Shuyi’s “earnest persuasion,” the crowd that had just been gathered at the door quickly dispersed, and the place fell quiet.

Ning Shuyi let out a breath of relief and turned to go back inside. As she did, she found herself met by the admiring gazes of her two junior colleagues.

“Senior Sister! I’ve learned something today!” The young officers, who had just been flushed with anger at those two livestreamers, were now beaming. “That move you just used was brilliant. You didn’t have to lift a finger, and you got everyone to back off without hurting anyone’s feelings!”

Ning Shuyi smiled indifferently and waved it off. “Curiosity and timidity are two traits that seem contradictory, but very often they happen to appear in the same person. If you use that properly, the problem solves itself.”

Back at the scene, the excavation in the bathroom was still in full swing, and more than half of a female corpse was already visible.

Ning Shuyi did not disturb the people working inside. Instead, she turned to look for Huo Yan, and found him crouched by the wall, studying something intently.

“Find anything?” she asked, walking over and crouching beside him to examine the wall in front of them.

This apartment did not have any particularly lavish decoration. The walls were ordinary white plaster, but after years of wear, they could hardly still be called white at all. The whole surface looked dull and gray, with a few dirty smudges here and there—obviously marks left by careless brushing in everyday life.

Huo Yan pointed to a trace on the wall: there was a shallow dent there, the paint had not peeled, but the surface was no longer even. “This mark was made recently.”

Then he turned and pointed at the little coffee table in the living room. “That table is crooked, and the disorder in the living room clearly isn’t the normal state.

“From the distance between the table and the wall, and from the shape of this dent, I suspect there was a struggle in the living room before.

“The shape and size of that dent are very much like the result of an elbow strike. And down here there’s another black mark—that came from a shoe kicking it. It’s the black edge of a vulcanized shoe, leaving a black smear on the wall.”

He stood up and looked around before shaking his head at Ning Shuyi. “I’ve also looked through both bedrooms. The master bedroom is fairly messy, while the other one is very tidy.

“Just now I took a look. What they dug out from the concrete was part of a female corpse. The body has been buried for so many days that decomposition has already started, and the son has been missing all this time. He should be the prime suspect, right?”

Ning Shuyi nodded.

“Then there’s something odd about it,” Huo Yan said, furrowing his brows as his gaze once again fell on the black mark on the wall. “If the dead person is the female resident here, a woman in her sixties or so, would she have worn vulcanized shoes?

“If the footprint wasn’t left by her, then as an older woman, she would not have had the physical strength to force another adult into a struggle that made him kick against the wall.”

What Huo Yan pointed out was indeed puzzling. Ning Shuyi looked at the shoe mark on the wall, then turned to glance at the coffee table that had been knocked crooked.

“According to the sort of struggle you just described, looking at the distance on both sides, the female victim’s build probably wouldn’t have been especially petite either. Otherwise her legs wouldn’t have been long enough to reach that wall.”

She pointed out another detail that also seemed somewhat unreasonable.

Their questions were answered soon enough.

It was not long before the latest development came from the excavation site: beside the female corpse whose body had already been half dug out of the massive, hardened block of concrete, they had also pried out a hand.

Most important of all, judging by both the size and the angle of this hand, it absolutely could not belong to that female corpse.

That meant there was more than one body sealed inside the concrete. Aside from this woman, the size of the hand suggested there should be another body, and it was a male corpse.

“That explains it,” Ning Shuyi said with a nod. “At first, when this mother and son were missing for so long and a female corpse sealed in concrete was found in the house, if that really was the mother who had disappeared days ago, then the person most likely to be suspected was naturally her son.

“But now that a male corpse’s hand has also been found, the first suspect who would have been investigated may well become our second victim.”

A thirty-year-old adult man, so long as he wasn’t especially small, would make perfect sense if he had struggled in the living room, knocked the coffee table crooked, and left behind the marks of a vulcanized shoe edge kicking against the wall.

Huo Yan frowned and nodded. “If it really is that mother and son, then this becomes an extermination case.”

“Just how much hatred would that take...” Ning Shuyi looked around, studying everything in the apartment, and felt increasingly puzzled. “Extermination cases are usually carried out with immense hatred, and most of them are relatively impulsive and violent.

“If we view this as an extermination case, then this scene seems a little too calm, a little too clean.”

Huo Yan glanced around. If one didn’t know what was in the bathroom, there was absolutely nothing about the apartment that suggested anything unusual. Even the faint signs of struggle in the living room were not enough to make someone think of a serious criminal case.

Ning Shuyi went into the master bedroom and saw that it was indeed quite disordered. Half of the quilt was still on the bed, while the other half had drooped down and trailed onto the floor beside it. Of the two pillows, one hung precariously at the edge of the bed, while the other had been compressed out of shape, flattened into a lump beside the headboard.

The master bedroom was not spacious either. Besides the double bed, there was a row of built-in cabinets. All the cabinet doors were open, and there were many clothes inside. They looked as though someone had rifled through them: some garments had slipped off their hangers and fallen to the floor, while others were barely hanging on.

Inside the cabinets there was also a chest of drawers tucked in tightly. Nearly every drawer had been opened, and the contents were in utter disarray. Some drawers were crammed full of miscellaneous things, with plenty spilling out onto the floor outside, while others looked nearly empty, with hardly anything inside at all.

The situation in the second bedroom was much the same. Compared with the master bedroom, it looked rather tidier, especially the bed. The sheets were spread out neatly, and both the pillows and pillowcases were smooth and proper, meticulously arranged. But the wardrobe and desk drawers had clearly been searched.

Ning Shuyi looked at everything before her with growing confusion, unable to make sense of it.

End of chapter.