Chapter 6 - Case 1: Dismemberment

Chapter 6

Five minutes later, Lu Siyu locked the door and went downstairs to the parking lot. The other two cars had already driven away, only Song Wen was waiting for him. Looking at him take a seat in the passenger seat, Song Wen asked, “What took you so long?”

Lu Siyu whispered, “Took a while searching…”

“Is the door locked?”

“Hmm.” Lu Siyu bowed his head and put the seatbelt on.

“Where do you live? I’ll take you home.” Song Wen saw that Lu Siyu wasn’t in good spirits and felt that he had indeed been a bit harsh on the newbie, so he offered to drive him home as compensation.

Lu Siyu opened his mouth to give an address and started playing with his phone with his head down. He looked at the phone with his eyes, but he was thinking of other things, and he didn’t notice that the phone screen had turned black.

Today, Lu Siyu found a detail in the deceased’s phone. In the browser’s favorites bar, there was an App marked with a blue circle. other people did not notice, but Lu Siyu happened to recognize – Blued, that was a gay dating community platform. He only touched the phone for a couple of minutes, recording its model and number before it was taken away by the physical evidence. It was a tricky finding and Lu Siyu told no one about it. He expected that it would soon be discovered as the investigation proceeds.

It was already dark and soon they entered the highway. There were long queues of lights along the roads of the city. In the morning there was a traffic jam due to the peak work hour and now there was traffic jam due to peak off work hours. Urban people in the city are like migratory birds, everyday migrating.

Lu Siyu was dazed for a moment and looked out of the car. From this angle from the window , he could see the iconic building of South City, the South City Tower. That was also the first highest point of South City, and in the night sky of the city, the South City Tower was glowing with lights.

It seems that since ancient Babylon, humans have been building towers. They always felt that standing on the top of tall towers, made them closest to the sky and the gods. There are many cities in the world where towers are important landmarks. The Eiffel Tower, the Tokyo Tower, the Dubai Tower, the Oriental Pearl Tower… all these towers have their own characteristics. It costs a lot of money and manpower, but it also provides a lot of jobs, and there was a viewing platform on the tower, from which one can see the entire city.

Once upon a time, the tower was a place of hope and the pride of the South Side. People even travelled and often met under the tower.

More than ten years ago, South city had undergone a transformation, the company was restructured, and many people were unemployed. That’s when the first person jumped from the South Tower.

Suddenly, such a move shocked the entire city.

People looked at the tower again, but their eyes changed and at that time, in the midst of the circumstances, there were even imitators, and within months, the place even developed into a suicide sanctuary. In order to change the situation, the South City government had to fund a restoration of the tower to put an end to the safety hazards.

And then, after the pain, the South City developed rapidly and the South City Tower was no longer isolated. Next to it, many high-rise buildings stood up.

Today, this place was already a memory for the people of South City. Only the tourists, who still treat this place as a check-in attraction, making it have a steady stream of daily traffic….

(T/N: facebook check-in)

In the darkness, lights projected down from the South City Tower were not far away, illuminating Lu Siyu’s dark eyes with stars.

“Looking at the South City Tower?” Song Wen looked at Lu Siyu.

“Mm.” Lu Siyu responded in a small voice.

Song Wen said, “You can go up there later. I haven’t been there for a long time, and I heard that there’s a new glass walkway up there.”

Lu Siyu seemed not interested in this proposal. After a few seconds of silence, he somewhat in-differently responded, “There will be time for that later.”

As the car turned a corner, the South City Tower disappeared from sight, Lu Siyu turned his head and Song Wen sneaked a glance at him from the mirror. The light from the street lamp spilled down obliquely, shining on the little forehead and high nose bridge exposed under the bangs of Lu Siyu. It looked like fine white porcelain. In this way, he was even more beautiful. At this time this beauty blinked his eyelashes and there was no expression on his face, which made people unable to see what he was thinking.

As the car drove out for a few kilometers, Song Wen stretched out his index finger and tapped the steering wheel. “You said before…” looking sideways, Lu Siyu was asleep in the passenger seat. His head was leaning against the window, his body curled up slightly, an insecure position, as if the full day of surveying had used up all his energy. The orange light from the front of the car illuminated the side of his face, imprinting the graceful and somewhat sharp curve of his jaw, giving a golden warm glow to the bridge of his nose and making him look extremely clean.

Song Wen forgot what he wanted to say for a moment and reached out to turn off that overhead light.

After driving for a while, the time passed eight o’clock, passing the evening rush hour, and the whole city became lazy as if it was falling asleep.The car finally stopped in front of the address Lu Siyu said. Song Wen was hesitant to wake him up and Lu Siyu moved and woke up by himself. He stretched his hand to rub his eyes and found that he had already arrived and his whole person was a little dazed and said “Thank you Captain Song.”

Song Wen reminded him, “Don’t forget to take your stuff.”

Lu Siyu looked at the bag behind him and the bottle of water in his hand, “I’ve brought them all.”

“And the survey records!”

“Got it, I will hand them in tomorrow.”

Only then did Song Wen let him go and waved his hand, “See you tomorrow.”

Witnessing Song Wen leave, Lu Siyu’s eyes returned to clear and bright, his entire sleepiness was gone. Instead of walking into the neighborhood behind him, he stopped a taxi walking to a new stop and gave another address. Then he hurriedly sent a few WeChat messages and silently produced a series of numbers. It was the mobile phone number of the victim Lin Zhenghua.

Several records popped up on the search page, all of which were of some dating sites. The person in the photo was difficult to associate with today’s wrecked corpse, but Lu Siyu can recognize it at a glance as the one of the ID card.

Looking at the information, Lu Siyu frowned. The long absence of food made his stomach ache worse and he couldn’t concentrate. He reached out and grabbed the pill box in his pocket. In the past, the easiest way to solve the problem was to get a pill, but now, the medicine inside was empty. Lu Siyu gently bit the nail of his thumb with his teeth and gnawed it unevenly. Suddenly his fingers touched something. It was the candy that Cheng Xiaobing shoved in during the day without any explanation.

Lu Siyu tore open the package and put it in his mouth. With the sugar in it, the silky sweet taste spread in his mouth. Those restless and uneasy emotions seemed to have been suppressed.

♛♛♛

Song Wen drove all the way down Cheng Yang Road to Dr. Zhou’s clinic, which was located in an upscale commercial office building that still had many floors lit up at this time of night.

Song Wen parked the police car in the downstairs parking lot and walked to the eighth floor of the office building.

The little nurse at the appointment desk had already recognized him and apologized slightly when she saw Song Wen come in, “Captain Song, Dr. Zhou is still seeing patients, so please sit here for a while.”

Every client at the psychiatric clinic had an appointment, so there wasn’t much of a chance to wait. There were a couple of couch seats on the side of the clinic , which were almost brand new since it opened.

Song Wen with the help of the little nurse borrowed a pen and paper and sat on the side, habitually sketching on the paper.

Drawing was the best way for him to pass the time, even more so than playing with his mobile phone, and whenever he picked up a brush, his heart just calmed down.

Song Wen was thinking about today’s dismemberment case, and not long after, a face was sketched out on the paper. It was the victim’s head that had been found in the refrigerator. The hair was messy, the eyes were tightly closed, and there were jagged cuts under the neck.

The case was without a clue and Song Wen went through the exercise again casually, he emptied his mind. The tip of his pen rustling across the paper, eyes, nose, mouth… he drew a jawline, a precise line, then the part of the Adam’s apple, his strokes on it, falling a little, and then Song Wen froze, staring at it for a few seconds, crumpled up the paper.

Subconsciously, he drew the face of Lu Siyu.

At that moment, Dr. Zhou’s patient came out. It was a woman in her fifties, slightly chubby, with a happy looking face not at all in need of psychological consultation, but there was joy in her expression, with excited tears in the corners of her eyes. Like a believer worshipping a Buddha with the satisfaction of all sufferings being solved.

Song Wen walked in, Zhou Yining was already waiting there for him. He held up his glasses, searched through the files on the side, lifted his hand and handed him Lu Siyu’s report.

Song Wen sat across from Zhou Yining, it was a standard patient’s seat, a comfortable position for conversation. It was just 3cms lower than Zhou Yining’s, but it created a subtle difference between the patient and the doctor.

Song Wen received that report and looked at it. He had seen many such reports, the higher the score the higher the safety, indicating that the psychological quality was better and suitable for criminal police work. Lu Siyu’s score wasn’t in the top, but it was above average. Song Wen was a little puzzled, “The scores are good, you could have let others come over and collect, why do you have to make me come personally.”

Zhou Yining rubbed his eyebrows somewhat wearily. He had received six patients today and was a bit overloaded with digesting all those negative emotions, “What appears on the surface might not always be true.” Then he explained, “Psychology questions are set in a certain direction, and if you know enough about those tests, you can present the appearance that you want others to see.”

Song Wen asked, “So, you’re saying that the kid memorized the questions?” This set of questions was drawn from the question bank and was not classified as confidential. As long as one knew the system, one would be able to find the questions and understand the rules of judgment.

Zhou Yining shook his head and answered the question, “Have you noticed that this newcomer is slightly slow to respond and lacks emotional changes.”

Song Wen nodded. In today’s exchanges, he had also discovered these characteristics of Lu Siyu. But he was not one who studied psychology after all, so didn’t know what they represented.

Zhou Yining explained, “In the conversation with him after the exam, I sensed some subtle manifestations. At first, I thought it was because he was trying to predict my questions. This kind of behavior is often seen among some smart people who think that after memorizing the book, they are prepared for psychologists and that their answers to the questions would be foolproof. But often those people are not professional enough, so there will be loopholes in their answers, and observing those loopholes is also a way for me to get information…” In the beginning, he regarded Lu Siyu only as a research object. He was an observer, an assessor, always in contact with various kinds of people. Lu Siyu was just one of them.

“After the conversation, I came to the conclusion that I felt he had some emotional apathy, manifested as emotional unresponsiveness and slowness. Even though his inner emotions were rich, he rarely showed it. He would maintain an attitude of distrust and dissatisfaction with the outside world and have difficulty getting close to people. This is not a big deal. As those of us who study psychology, many people have psychological problems, large and small. A person who has no problems at all is like living in a vacuum. , It’s almost impossible. As long as it doesn’t affect daily work and life, these small problems are harmless, so I passed his evaluation.”

At this point, Zhou Yining paused for a moment, then said, “But when I reviewed this conversation, I realized that I may have made a wrong judgment…” When he said this, he slightly pursed his lips and touched his hands together. This was a subtle movement that he does not want to acknowledge and accept. His gaze flickered, and he stopped talking…

“Doctor Zhou, you’re our South City’s psychology expert.” Song Wen’s first reaction was disbelief, he felt that this should be a joke played on him by Zhou Yining. Those who studied psychology acted a bit divine, they liked to throw out all sorts of topics to test people’s psychology, and Dr. Zhou had screwed him over like this before. Today, Song Wen after spending time with Lu Siyu admitted that he was a bit strange but it was only a bit. He might have certain strange traits in him, but it was definitely not that serious.

Zhou Yining looked at Song Wen with a serious expression. It didn’t seem to be joking at all. He closed his eyes, put down his glasses and continued, “…that is, there is a possibility that I was induced and led on. Got confused by superficial aspects and didn’t discover more of actual substance. I could not see his real self.”

Song Wen frowned slightly. Being able to induce and compel a senior psychiatrist, he naturally knew what this meant.

He suddenly recalled his painting just now. The technique of drawing dead people and drawing living people was not exactly the same. The dead were lifeless and their lives were long frozen at the moment of death. The living, on the other hand, always carried emotions, whether they were evil or angry, friendly or humble….

But the drawing of Lu Siyu that he had drawn with his pencil just now had no emotion at all.

Perhaps that was the right feeling. At that time, his pencil had already seen through the person when he still hadn’t.

♛♛♛

Translating team shenanigans

Cye : Guys, Uni has been hectic, I have so many assignments… I’m so sad that I can’t continue with the project. .(╥︣﹏᷅╥) It was great worki…

Mochi : I will miss your emoticons ( ˘︹˘ )

Hells : Miss you senpai (◕︵◕)

Cye : I will miss you too guys. (╥﹏╥) It was nice getting..

Mochi : Your emoticons were good. I loved them ( ˘︹˘ )

Cye : …to know you guys. I wish you all the..

Mochi : Where did you find those awesome emoticons (ʘ‿ʘ)

Cye : best ╮ (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.) ╭ …ahhh (ﾉಥ益ಥ）ﾉ ┻━┻

.

a few moments later //ugly sobbing in the background//

.

Translating team :