Chapter 29: The Mysterious Playing Card—A Clue to the Murderer?

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Chapter Twenty-Nine

On a rainy night, a man in a black raincoat burst out of a narrow alley.

His entire face was hidden beneath the hood, making his features impossible to see.

After rushing from the alley, the man paused for the briefest moment before walking without hesitation toward Jinling University, swallowed by the darkness.

“Murderer.”

Su Chen cast the man a sharp glance and began walking beside him.

Like a bloodhound tracking a scent.

“You’re going to kill a young woman tonight, aren’t you?” Su Chen asked, turning his head.

But the man in the raincoat could not hear him, because everything before Su Chen had been constructed through imagination and deduction.

Su Chen also knew that the reason he could not see the man’s face was that he had yet to piece together the complete chain of evidence.

His fingertip moved lightly through the air.

In an instant, the passage of time throughout the entire crime scene accelerated.

Following her, entering the building, killing her, disposing of the body—the raincoat-clad man’s movements became so rapid that they seemed to flicker between frames.

“Stop.”

At Su Chen’s quiet command, the man’s movements slowed once more.

“Let me see where you hid that girl’s body.”

Su Chen spoke calmly to the raincoat man, who was digging furiously at the ground before him.

To see the man’s face and determine the true murderer, at least three things were required. The first was the victim’s complete body.

Twenty years earlier, the police had recovered more than a thousand fragments, but the body they reconstructed had not been complete.

Two vital parts were missing, and they had never been found in the twenty years since.

Some claimed the reason was simply that there had not been enough clues.

Yet some experts had proposed another theory: the clues had been sufficient all along. They had merely been buried among an ocean of case files, unnoticed by anyone.

No one had possessed the ability to connect those tangled threads.

But now, before Su Chen, based on the records in the case files and his own terrifying powers of deductive imagination, the murderer’s entire process of hiding the body was laid bare.

Su Chen realized that theory had been correct.

“So that’s how it was. So that’s how it was. You hid her deeply.”

He watched as the murderer abandoned the final bag of remains, his gaze cold and sharp as a blade.

At that moment, the entire scene came to a halt.

Then the imagined world shattered.

Su Chen opened his eyes, and the scene before him returned to the bustling traffic of Jinling.

The streets echoed with the noise of pedestrians.

He exhaled slowly.

“With the evidence and physical clues currently available, I can only deduce events up to that point in time.”

“To continue, I need to find the two bags of missing remains and obtain additional evidence.”

He pondered this silently.

However, the remains had been buried for more than twenty years. Once exposed to the air, they would oxidize easily and lose the information they originally contained.

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Given his current resources, he had no oxygen-free storage facility and could not remove the remains while preserving the evidence.

So how could he collect the evidence?

Su Chen reflected for two seconds. Then, suddenly, he knew the answer.

Of course. He could use the expert team to do it. They certainly had the facilities necessary to preserve and study the remains.

A faint, almost imperceptible smile curved his lips.

He turned and entered the convenience store beside him, where he bought a deck of playing cards.

…

Deep into the night, it was inevitable that some people in Jinling would remain sleepless.

One hundred and nine frontline criminal investigators swept through the entire urban district with flashlights, conducting a carpet search centered on unfinished buildings.

Their goal was to find the scattered pieces of pig meat that Su Chen had discarded throughout Jinling.

Driven by the call of this long-unsolved case, the investigators moved with remarkable speed. It also helped that Su Chen had been rather poor at disposing of the remains.

In less than two hours, bags of “remains” made from pork had been arranged across the tables in the expert team’s office. Every piece was carefully documented.

Discovery location, time of discovery, weight of the discarded remains…

Forensic examiner Qin Ming put on a pair of latex gloves and glanced at Duan Yu, who was still diligently tapping away at his code nearby.

He shrugged, then frowned as he examined the data on the remains.

“Director Guo’s daughter, Guo Yutong… The victim weighed sixty kilograms when she was alive, correct?” Qin Ming asked Bai Su.

Bai Su nodded.

“Then something’s wrong. The weight doesn’t match. The total weight of these pork remains is insufficient—five kilograms less than the victim’s body weight. Five kilograms…”

Qin Ming set down the data he had collected.

Then his expression changed dramatically.

He hurriedly called to his assistant:

“Quickly, retrieve that case file—the file on the unsolved case from twenty years ago!”

“Yes, Officer Qin!”

The assistant was startled by his urgency. He immediately tapped on his tablet and accessed the electronic archives using his expert credentials.

Before long, the complete file on the Jinling University dismemberment case had been brought up.

“If I remember correctly, when the Jinling criminal investigation team collected the victim’s remains back then, part of the body was never found, correct?”

Qin Ming stared at the information on the tablet so intently that his gaze seemed capable of piercing straight through it.

“Yes, Mr. Qin!”

“Find that section of the records!”

At his command, the assistant’s fingers flew across the screen as he searched through the endless reports for information on the results of the remains collection.

Suddenly, his fingers stopped.

His eyes widened, and even his breathing quickened. His voice was filled with disbelief.

“This… How is this possible?”

“Give it to me.”

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Qin Ming snatched the tablet from him. The moment he saw the contents, his pupils contracted sharply.

“Final archival report for this case… A total of one thousand one hundred and twenty-nine fragments have been recovered. The estimated total living body weight was fifty-five kilograms.”

“The difference from the victim’s weight when alive is…”

“Five kilograms!”

Boom!

It was as though a bolt of lightning had exploded inside Qin Ming’s mind.

How could it be so precise? How had this murderer managed to recreate the case with such accuracy—even the exact weight of the missing remains?

It was practically as though the murderer had committed the crime all over again.

The viewers in the livestream were horrified by the revelation as well.

[Su Chen has gone way too far this time. Is he trying to keep everyone awake all night?]

[Good grief! I thought Su Chen saying “I bought too little” to that girl earlier was just a joke. Who would have guessed he deliberately bought less meat so it would match the real unsolved case?!]

[Have you noticed? Even the victim’s weight is exactly the same. I honestly feel like Su Chen is the murderer from twenty years ago.]

[That’s impossible. Su Chen was only two years old twenty years ago. How could he have committed the crime?]

[Even so, it’s still terrifying…]

Inside the expert team’s laboratory, Qin Ming took quite some time to recover from his shock.

He set down the tablet and picked up a scalpel, his expression focused.

“…Very well. We’ll begin dissecting the remains.”

The blade sliced through the muscle.

Though Qin Ming’s heart was still shaken, his hand did not tremble in the slightest. The scalpel moved with practiced fluidity.

This was the highest standard expected of a forensic examiner.

The assistant and the frontline investigators beside him watched Qin Ming’s movements, scarcely daring to breathe.

At that moment, they felt as though they had truly entered a murder scene and were dissecting the victim’s body.

Then, while examining the second piece of pork, the knife in Qin Ming’s hand suddenly stopped.

It seemed to have struck something foreign.

“…What is this?”

Qin Ming applied more pressure and discovered that the object had been rolled up and stuffed inside the hollow bone of the piece of remains.

Using tweezers, he carefully drew it out.

Then his expression froze.

It was a playing card, rolled tightly into a cylinder.

“Could it be that the murderer deliberately left us a clue?!”

Everyone stared in astonishment.

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