Chapter 548: Stuck in the Mire

At noon, after school, Tao Yueyue had lunch near the school as usual. On her way back, she suddenly felt someone following her. When she turned around, she saw a boy in the No. 6 High School uniform quickly hiding behind a utility pole.

Instinctively wary of strangers, Tao Yueyue quickened her pace and returned to the classroom. Many students who didn’t go home for lunch were napping. The boys were gathered, playing games, and Wei Zeng Mary was lying on her desk, giggling at a shoujo manga on her phone.

“Mary, I think someone was following me just now,” Tao Yueyue said.

“What? A boy or a girl?”

“A boy. I think I’ve seen him before; he’s from our school.”

“Ew, maybe someone has a crush on you!”

“You always have wild thoughts!”

Tao Yueyue returned to her seat. Her usual lunchtime entertainment was reading a thick classic book. Wei Zeng Mary leaned over, continuing the topic, “Was he handsome? Tall?”

“I! Don’t! Know!”

“Oh come on, don’t you ever think about these things? Have you ever received a love letter or had a crush?”

“I like Stendhal.”

“Which class is he in?”

Tao Yueyue tapped the author’s name on the book cover.

“Ugh, stop teasing! I mean in real life.”

“Do I have to say someone to satisfy you?” Tao Yueyue flipped through her book casually.

“I get it!”

“Get what?”

“You have a father complex…”

“Don’t talk nonsense!” Tao Yueyue blushed.

“You must like older brother types, so none of the boys in our class catch your eye.”

Tao Yueyue sneered, but then caught something out of the corner of her eye. She turned to see the same boy peeking through the window and then quickly ducking away.

Meanwhile, Chen Shi and the police were at a desolate field in the suburbs. A charred female corpse lay in a dirt pit. From experience, Chen Shi judged that the body was burned after death. The killer had been thorough, smashing the woman’s face and cutting open her abdomen, spreading accelerants all over her body and inside her. The whole body had shrunk from the fire, looking dry and thin, leaving only a charred skeleton.

Peng Sijue was collecting skin fragments from the corpse. Chen Shi squatted beside him and asked, “Can you determine the time of death?”

Peng Sijue shook his head, “Burns like this cause a lot of error.”

Lin Dongxue had sent a few people to retrieve surveillance footage from nearby intersections and search the area for any remaining traces. The police found several shoe prints, a tire mark, and some fabric fragments that might be from the victim’s clothes, lifted by the heat during the burning.

Chen Shi paced the hallway all afternoon, anxiously waiting for results. The preliminary autopsy report came out first: the victim had dense blunt force injuries on her head, but it was impossible to tell if they were inflicted before or after death due to the burning.

The internal organs were mostly charred, making the stomach contents and liver temperature useless for determining the time of death. They could only conclude, based on the plants at the bottom of the pit, that the time of death was within the past week.

The skin on the victim’s fingertips had been cut off, seemingly to hide her identity, but DNA testing revealed the body was Lin Xiaoxiao.

Upon hearing the result, Chen Shi said, “Maybe cutting off the fingerprints wasn’t to hide her identity but for another reason. Lao Peng, can you further investigate the fingerprints on the foot spa box?”

“We’re working on it.”

The surveillance task was troublesome. There were too many vehicles passing through the intersections within a week to check one by one. After two days of nonstop work, on the morning of October 10th, they finally had an answer. The vehicle that dumped the body was a black SUV that passed through the intersection on the night of October 1st. The tire prints matched those at the scene, but when traced to the owner, they claimed their car had been stolen on October 1st, which was reported to the police.

All clues pointed to October 1st as the time of Lin Xiaoxiao’s disappearance. Peng Sijue’s lab results showed that the oil secretion levels in the fingerprints on the foot spa box were far lower than those of a living person.

In other words, the person who held the box and handed it to Lin’s father that day might have been the already dead Lin Xiaoxiao, or someone else had used skin cut from the dead to fake her fingerprints.

The whole case was shrouded in mystery. That morning, while everyone was out investigating, Chen Shi sat in the empty office, holding a cup of coffee, frowning deeply. He hadn’t rested well in days, and dark circles ringed his eyes.

Despite the body being found and the case reclassified, with a pile of new clues to follow, the most critical lead had hit a dead end. He couldn’t figure out how the mastermind made a dead person “come back to life” and be seen by three unrelated witnesses!

He had considered the possibility of disguise and looked up some information, but real-life disguise techniques weren’t as miraculous as fiction. Even the “Fujisaki Ayumi Disguise Method” used by spies only altered facial muscles with clay and makeup. Such a static fake face was like a mask and couldn’t fool a biological father.

Besides, imitating another person was extremely difficult. Chen Shi himself wore a different face, but when the real Chen Shi appeared, he noticed vast differences in their temperament, micro-expressions, and small movements, making short-term imitation impossible.

Then there was the voice, the hardest to copy.

He imagined a bunch of possibilities, but the answer was always the same: impossible!

It was an impossible crime, brilliant and frustrating, leaving him both defeated and a bit in awe.

Footsteps approached behind him. From the sound, he knew it was Peng Sijue. Chen Shi asked, “Any new findings?”

“I noticed you get completely absorbed in a case. Sorry, no new discoveries.”

Peng Sijue pulled out the chair next to him and sat down. “Today is your ‘birthday.'”

Chen Shi thought for a moment, then smiled, “Right, my ‘birthday.'”

“You look worn out. Why not take a day off?”

“Wow, it’s rare to hear you show concern.”

Peng Sijue took out a cigarette. Since it was a special day, Chen Shi didn’t refuse for once, lit it, and took a satisfying drag. “Do you think Zhou Tianan is behind this case?”

“Without evidence, my thoughts don’t matter. Speculation is useless; action is what counts.”

“Let’s discuss it! It’s no fun otherwise.”

“Don’t get stuck on it. There have been cases solved years later, like that old serial murder case, still unsolved.”

“Are you saying I’ll always lose to Zhou Tianan?”

Peng Sijue made a helpless gesture.

“He’s a professional criminal, with top-notch psychological quality, methods, and anti-detection skills. But he has weaknesses too. He could’ve buried the body locally, but he brazenly left it for us to find, like a challenge. He’s arrogant. Killing is a game to him. Maybe we’ve already missed clues because we weren’t aware!”