Han Huaixiao spun the car around and sped toward the First Affiliated Hospital. Xia Hang tried calling He Zhengye again, but still couldn’t get through.
Seeing that, Xia Ling dialed He Zhengye’s assistant, Jian Liang. Just as the call was about to disconnect automatically, it finally went through. On the other side, Jian Liang’s voice sounded weak, crying, “Sister Ling… we were ambushed.”
Xia Ling immediately put the call on speaker. “Where are you right now?”
“I… I don’t know,” Jian Liang replied.
“Send me your location,” Xia Ling said. “Where’s your boss?”
“He’s still unconscious,” Jian Liang said, sounding like she was shaking him. “Boss… Boss…”
He Zhengye groggily came to, and the first thing he did was check Tang Yueqian’s body. However…
It was gone.
Seeing that Jian Liang was still on the phone with Xia Ling, he quickly said, “Tell Han Huaixiao, after we picked up Tang Yueqian’s body, we were hit by another car when leaving the underground parking lot of the First Affiliated Hospital! When we got out to check, someone used drugs to knock us unconscious. The car is still here, but the body is gone.”
Han Huaixiao glanced at the location Jian Liang had sent, noticing it was in the eastern suburbs.
“Get out of the car and find somewhere safe to stay,” he instructed. “We’re on our way.”
Half an hour later, Han Huaixiao and the others finally reached them. The car was still there, but completely empty inside. He Zhengye had been with the criminal police for years. One look at Han Huaixiao’s expression, and he knew how serious things were.
“The other two bodies… they’re gone too?” he asked.
Xia Ling nodded. “Yes. The report came in before we got here.”
“These people are completely insane.” He Zhengye’s face darkened.
“It looks like the three children were hiding some kind of secret,” Xia Ling frowned. “They’re trying to destroy the evidence.”
At that, Jian Liang looked confused, asking, “But… they’re just kids. What kind of secret could they possibly have?”
“Exactly.” Xia Ling’s expression grew colder. “They were so young… what did those people do to them?”
As for Han Huaixiao, he began issuing orders immediately.
“Xia Ling, take He Zhengye and Jian Liang to the hospital for a check-up. Xia Hang, drive the forensic vehicle back to the bureau and have the trace analysis team examine the car for any evidence.”
“Aren’t you coming back with us?” Xia Hang hesitated.
“I’m heading to the Children’s Hospital,” Han Huaixiao replied. “After Xia Ling returns, you go with her to the funeral home.”
Hearing that, He Zhengye waved his hand, disagreeing with a “I feel fine. I can drive myself and take Jian Liang to the hospital. Xia Ling, you go back to the bureau with Xia Hang.”
“Yeah,” Jian Liang nodded. “I’m fine too. No need to escort us.”
“Alright.” Han Huaixiao gave a brief nod.
After sending He Zhengye’s car back to the bureau and handing it over to the trace analysis team, Xia Ling and Xia Hang took another group of technicians and rushed to the funeral home.
Meanwhile, by the time Han Huaixiao arrived at the Children’s Hospital, Wen Yu, whom he had called ahead, was already waiting at the entrance.
“Captain Han, Sister Yan, and the others have already gone down to investigate,” she said. Han Huaixiao gestured for her to get in the car, and they drove into the underground parking lot.
Lao Hong was pacing anxiously by the elevator. The moment he saw them, he rushed over like they were his saviors.
“Captain Han, we didn’t lose the body! It wasn’t us!”
“Have you checked the surveillance footage?” Han Huaixiao asked.
“We did,” Lao Hong said, flustered. “The footage was overwritten. We don’t even know how the body disappeared. This… this…”
Overwritten.
Just as he suspected.
Han Huaixiao glanced at Wen Yu. Without needing instructions, she had already grabbed her laptop and headed straight for the monitoring room. As for Han Huaixiao and the forensic staff, they put on shoe covers and entered the morgue.
“How did you discover Cai Yingxia’s body was missing?” he turned to the staff member and asked.
“A family came to view another deceased person,” the staff member explained, “also surnamed Cai. I must’ve mistaken the name and opened the wrong drawer. When I saw it was empty, I checked again and immediately reported it.”
“Before you discovered the body was missing, what were you doing?” Han Huaixiao asked.
The staff member glanced nervously at Lao Hong, mumbling, “I… was in the restroom.”
Lao Hong immediately understood and snapped angrily, “You people think the hospital leadership never comes down here, so you just hide in the restroom all day playing on your phones! No sense of responsibility at all!”
Han Huaixiao had no interest in watching him scold his staff. He turned to Liu Yan instead, asking, “Sister Yan, what do you have?”
Liu Yan was carefully lifting a fingerprint, but she shook her head, reporting, “The prints we’ve collected are all clear. Most likely, they belong to the morgue staff.”
Well… Han Huaixiao already knew that if they dared to steal bodies from a hospital, they would have come fully prepared. They wouldn’t leave any trace behind, so there was little chance Wen Yu would recover anything either.
When they reached the surveillance room, that assumption was confirmed.
Wen Yu’s brows were tightly knit. She slammed her fist lightly against the desk in frustration, complaining, “Captain Han, the original data has been permanently erased! With my current tools, I can’t recover it.”
In fact, Wen Yu wasn’t lacking in skill, far from it. If even she couldn’t restore it, then no one would be able to do so quickly.
“You did what you could,” Han Huaixiao patted her shoulder.
With that, they finished the inspection and headed out.
Just as they reached the hospital entrance, a teenage boy suddenly darted out and stopped right in front of Han Huaixiao’s car. Captain Han reacted instantly, slamming on the brakes, and the car stopped just short of hitting him.
Han Huaixiao got out and slammed the door shut, anger flashing across his face.
“Are you blind?! That was…!”
“You’re Han Huaixiao from the Lang City Criminal Investigation Unit, right?” The boy stared straight at him, and Han Huaixiao paused, then narrowed his eyes slightly.
The boy stood up straighter, forcing himself to stay calm as he said, “My name is Cai Wenzhou. Captain Han, I have something to tell you.”
Han Huaixiao looked at him: middle school uniform, tense but determined.
“What is it?”
Cai Wenzhou glanced around, then lowered his voice, continuing, “I think my sister was murdered by Li Jinpeng and her tutoring teacher working together.”
“What evidence do you have?” Han Huaixiao’s gaze sharpened.
“I found a diary entry in my sister’s notebook,” Cai Wenzhou swallowed. “She wrote that one weekend, she went to her tutoring center. She finished correcting a test late, and by then most people had already left. She was afraid the teacher would leave, so she ran to the office. She was in a hurry and forgot to knock. When she pushed the door open, she saw her tutor and a man… doing that.”
He paused briefly, jaw tightening, before continuing, “She backed out immediately, but the tutor later warned her not to tell anyone. My sister knew the tutor was married and had a son. She really liked her, thought she was a great teacher. After finding out about the affair, she was very upset.”
“That same day, when she went to the hospital, she immediately recognized the doctor who treated her; it was the same man.”
“I checked. That doctor is also married. He’s even up for promotion, and his name is currently under public review on the hospital’s website. He must’ve recognized my sister, too. He was afraid she’d expose his affair and ruin his promotion… so he deliberately prescribed the wrong medication to kill her.”
“Do your parents know about this?” Han Huaixiao watched him steadily.
“They’re already devastated by my sister’s death,” Cai Wenzhou shook his head. “If they knew, they’d go after that bastard doctor themselves. I’ve already lost my sister, I don’t want my parents ending up in prison too.”
At that, Han Huaixiao studied him for a long moment before instructing, “We were heading to your house anyway. Get in.”
Once inside the car, Han Huaixiao asked, “How did you know this was my car?”
Cai Wenzhou hesitated, a little embarrassed, answering, “…I waited outside the city bureau for two days.”
“Persistent,” Wen Yu raised a brow. “But skipping school like that, your teachers aren’t looking for you?”
“My grandpa helped me take leave.”
When they arrived at the Cai household, only the grandfather was home. As for Cai Wenzhou’s parents, they had been hospitalized after learning their daughter’s body was missing.
Wen Yu stayed behind to comfort the old man, while Han Huaixiao followed Cai Wenzhou into Cai Yingxia’s room.
The room was warm and cozy, with cute, lush toys covering the bed. On the desk were practice papers, sketchbooks, and several printed photo albums.
Cai Wenzhou handed over the diary, and Han Huaixiao read through it carefully. The entry matched exactly what the boy had described.
“Which tutoring center did your sister attend? And the teacher’s name?”
Cai Wenzhou quickly wrote down the address, the tutor’s name, and phone number, then handed it over.
“Captain Han… you’ll get justice for my sister, right?”
“We will,” Han Huaixiao nodded. “I need to take this diary for the investigation. We’ll return it once the case is resolved.”
“Okay.”
Han Huaixiao took another slow look around the room, but nothing unusual stood out. He flipped through the sketchbook, which contained simple drawings of cartoon characters. Then he picked up the photo albums. The print quality was surprisingly good, almost as clear as professional studio photos. No wonder they’d made several copies.
Inside, Cai Yingxia smiled brightly, lively, pretty, and full of life.
Han Huaixiao asked, “Did your family post photos or videos of her online?”
“When she was a baby, yes. But after she turned two, my parents became very careful about her privacy. They stopped posting clear photos, at most, just her back or a blurry side profile.”
“If you remember anything else,” Han Huaixiao nodded, “contact me directly.”
After leaving the Cai residence, Han Huaixiao headed back to the detention center. Meanwhile, Xia Hang and Xia Ling arrived at the funeral home, where they found the same issue: the surveillance footage had been overwritten.
Xia Ling questioned the staff just as Han Huaixiao had earlier.
“Normally, you wouldn’t open storage unless necessary. How did you discover the body was missing?”
“Our supervisors came by earlier…” The staff member’s gaze flickered in clear guilt. “I knew the girl’s body was important, so I checked on it from time to time.”
“If you were checking regularly, how did it still go missing?” Xia Ling immediately saw through the lie.
The staff member silently cursed herself, thinking this officer wasn’t easy to fool.
“I… I don’t know.”
Xia Hang glanced at her hands, nervously rubbing together. Soon enough, he noticed the jade bangle on her wrist, its color and texture excellent. Back when he was in Myanmar, he had studied jade appraisal. The bracelet she was wearing was worth at least 150,000 yuan1.
A regular funeral home employee… would she really spend that much on a bracelet? And wear it so casually at work, without worrying about damaging it?
“That jade bangle on your wrist,” he asked, seemingly offhand, “nice piece. How much did you pay for it?”
At the mention of the bracelet, the staff member instinctively tugged her sleeve down, hiding it, while saying, “Not much. I bought it for a thousand yuan when I went to Yunnan.”
“Then you got lucky,” Xia Hang nodded. “That bracelet’s worth at least 150,000.”
Her eyes widened. Clearly, she had no idea it was that valuable, and Xia Ling caught on immediately, pressing further, “A couple of days ago, a jewelry store reported two jade bangles stolen, worth over 300,000 in total. The photos they provided look a lot like the one you’re wearing.”
“Theft involving 300,000 yuan counts as a major case,” Xia Hang added calmly, “That’s over ten years in prison… possibly life.”
“No, no, I didn’t steal it! This…” the staff member completely panicked, “this was taken from the body of the girl whose remains went missing!”
“When we saw her earlier,” Xia Hang’s gaze sharpened, “she wasn’t wearing anything. When did a jade bangle suddenly appear on her?”
The woman knew she couldn’t hide it anymore. Her voice trembled as she finally confessed: “A wealthy woman asked me to find a suitable girl… for her deceased son. A ghost marriage2. The bracelet was meant as a betrothal gift; I was supposed to put it on the girl. I thought the bracelet looked nice, so after the woman left, I secretly took it.”
“I got more and more uneasy wearing it… so I wanted to put it back. But when I went to do that, I found the body was gone. I panicked and forgot to take the bracelet off and return it.”
“I didn’t mean to steal it! As for why the body disappeared, I really don’t know!”
At that, both Xia Hang and Xia Ling stared at her in disbelief. They had only suspected she might have taken money and helped someone move the body, but they hadn’t imagined… something that vile.
“She was only twelve!” Xia Ling was shaking with anger. “Her life hadn’t even had the chance to begin! Dying was already tragic enough, and you still did something like this to her?! You’re not even human!”
As for Xia Hang, he called the local police station overseeing the funeral home and asked them to come handle the situation, but after leaving the funeral home, Xia Ling was still furious.
“Ling-jie,” Xia Hang handed her a bottle of water, saying, “Drink some water.”
“I’ve been a cop for years,” she let out a bitter laugh. “I thought I’d seen every kind of darkness, every kind of evil. But people keep finding new ways to prove me wrong.”
Xia Hang didn’t know how to comfort her, but he understood exactly how she felt. After a long pause, he looked down at the police badge on his uniform and said quietly: “Our understanding may be shattered again and again… but our faith won’t be.”
Xia Ling straightened slightly, a flicker of energy returning to her eyes. She glanced at him, a little surprised, finally saying:
“You’re right. Let’s go. Back to the bureau.”
- About 22k USD. ↩︎
- In Chinese tradition, a ghost marriage refers to a marriage in which one or both parties are deceased. The practice can be traced back to the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), with its participants being wealthy. Its origins stem from the yin and yang philosophy, where the yin has to merge with the yang in order to achieve harmony, and the philosophy of life after death. It was believed that if a person had died unmarried, their spirit would feel lonely in the afterlife. As these spirits are unable to find harmony, they would return to cause harm to living family members and their descendants. Due to this belief, living family members would seek out deceased individuals of the opposite sex to accompany the deceased during burial. China’s existing laws do not explicitly and directly prohibit the custom of ghost marriages. They only intervene if other illegal and criminal activities result from ghost marriages, including the theft of women’s corpses and the intentional killing of women for profit. In our situation, it’s as vile as you can imagine. Let alone that neither the girl nor her family consented to this, she was also basically sold as a child bride for some dead random guy, for the price of a jade bangle she didn’t even get to keep. ↩︎
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