Chapter 232

“Ah!” Gu Changzheng suddenly shouted.

“What’s wrong? Chief Gu!” Luo Fei’s grip on his gun tightened, nearly pulling the trigger.

“Get down! The old director...”

Gu Changzheng barked. Only then did the others remember they had been drawn here by the sudden eerie laughter—and not a single person had stayed behind to watch over the sleeping old director, Zhou Hui.

Luo Fei, young and agile, spun around and sprinted downstairs at once. Gu Changzheng glanced at the grotesque scene in the attic and at Lao Zheng: “Lao Zheng, you handle this. Look for any useful clues.”

Lao Zheng nodded, pulling on gloves and summoning his assistant to examine the scene. Suddenly, a loud shout came from downstairs—Luo Fei’s voice—followed by a deafening *bang!* Gu Changzheng recognized the sound of a gunshot. His expression tightened, and he hurried down the stairs.

Gu Changzheng reached the first-floor archive room half a minute after Luo Fei. He found Luo Fei slumped against the wall outside, pale as paper, blood oozing between his fingers from his abdomen. Archive folders lay scattered across the floor. He rushed over and supported Luo Fei: “Luo Fei! Where are you hurt?”

Luo Fei gasped, his voice faint: “Chief Gu... the man... the gray hoodie... he ran out...”

Gu Changzheng swiftly scanned the area. The rocking chair where Zhou Hui had lain was empty. Blood stained the backrest and seat. He touched it—the blood was still warm. Beyond, the front door stood wide open.

He turned to look inside the archive room. Luo Fei whispered: “N-not gone... the files... they’re still here. When I came down, the old director was already gone. I was just wondering... when the gray-clad man burst out of the archive room. Before I could react, he stabbed me in the stomach. I fired... but missed. He dropped the files and ran...”

“Alright, I understand. Don’t talk. I’m calling an ambulance. Hold on!”

He hadn’t expected that their visit to Angel Orphanage would spiral into so many disasters. Saving Luo Fei was the priority now—and in this short time, the outside had already vanished without a trace.

After handing Luo Fei over to the arriving ambulance, Gu Changzheng ordered the arriving detectives to seal and transport all archive files back to the station, and to lock down the entire villa.

At that moment, Lao Zheng arrived beside him. Gu Changzheng noticed his leather shoes and the lower half of his pants were soaked. He was about to ask when Lao Zheng spoke: “From the dust accumulation on the attic items, those objects have been there at least a month. There’s been a lot of rain lately, and this house is far from the city, so air quality is much better. It would take at least half a month for dust to form this layer. The tape recorder was placed there long ago—besides Luo Fei’s fingerprints from pressing the button again, there are no other traces. No footprints anywhere inside or along the exit routes.”

“Oh? Hmph! A locked-room mystery? Then who turned on the tape recorder?” Gu Changzheng frowned.

“It’s not necessarily a locked-room escape. The perpetrator is staging a show. Every attic in this building has a skylight. It’s hard to stand on, but not impossible.” Lao Zheng pointed to the ceiling.

“I checked. There’s a skylight on the roof slope—it opens from the outside. If prepared in advance, you could use some device to grab the tape recorder and lower it through the window, leaving no trace at all.”

Gu Changzheng suddenly understood: “The skylight opens upward, blocking rain from entering. So no water gets inside. The tape must have had blank space at the beginning. He planned this perfectly—just to create confusion, distract us, and give himself the chance to kill Director Zhou and steal the files!”

“But where is the old director?” Lao Zheng stood with his hands behind his back, gazing up at the towering roof.

“She’s still inside. When Luo Fei came down, he caught the gray-clad man trying to take the files. The blood on the rocking chair is still warm—she was just wounded by him.” In truth, Gu Changzheng didn’t know whether Director Zhou was alive or dead. But remembering her kind face, he unconsciously assumed she had merely been injured by the gray-clad man.

“Lao Zheng, did you find anything on the roof?” Gu Changzheng asked.

Lao Zheng held up a transparent evidence bag: “He left this on the window frame.”

Gu Changzheng saw a small strand of gray fiber inside.

———

On the ambulance, Luo Fei finally exhaled. Before the cold blade pierced his body, he saw the gray hoodie was wielding a scalpel—with an extended handle.

When he reacted and fired, the man’s hood fell off—but he still couldn’t see the man’s face. Beneath it was a white half-mask. Yet Luo Fei saw the eyes behind it. Black. Cold. Cruel. Bloodthirsty.

He wanted to report this to Gu Changzheng immediately, but his eyelids grew heavy. The ambulance siren seemed to fade farther away...

———

After a thorough search of the scene revealed no trace of Director Zhou, Gu Changzheng and his team were utterly lost. Could the gray-clad man really be that capable? Where had he taken Director Zhou? Had the woman simply vanished?

Of course not. Facing an unprecedented crisis, Gu Changzheng calmed down. He recalled the several murders since September—each crime scene lacked conventional traces, yet the killer had deliberately left behind the same brand of half-smoked cigarette. With the killer striking frequently and investigations stalled, not only was he under immense pressure as team leader, but the entire Zizhen police force and higher authorities were overwhelmed. Perhaps now was the time to calm down, analyze the surface patterns of these cases, and construct a psychological profile of the killer—instead of chasing blindly from one case to another.

The killer always violated the victims after killing them, then cruelly slit their abdomens and severed their genitals, suggesting a perverted mind, possibly mentally ill. But why arrange the internal organs into a cross and gouge out the victims’ eyes? Was it ritualistic or a diversion? He took enormous risks to kill Director Zhou right under the police’s nose and steal the files—clearly, Angel Orphanage was deeply connected to him.

Organizing these tangled clues, Gu Changzheng gained a new understanding of the gray-hooded killer: his victim list was inside the orphanage’s archives.