Fan

Lin Bobo placed the food on the ground.

Yi Ting shrank back in terror. The gag sealing her mouth had left a red mark on her cheek, and she could feel a sharp pain when she swallowed. Her pale face was covered in tear stains, and her eyes were so swollen she could barely open them.

Lin Bobo's shadow stretched to Yi Ting's feet. He was staring at her calves. Those slender calves were exposed below her school skirt, possessing the unique, smooth quality of a young girl. Lin Bobo felt a tremor of excitement. He was captivated by this sacredness, his gaze uncontrollably fixed.

Yi Ting was disgusted by Lin Bobo's filthy gaze. She pulled her calves back into the shadows.

Lin Bobo stood up, walked to the living room, and returned a moment later. He was holding a metal hairpin—it was Hu Xin's. He fawningly held the hairpin out for Yi Ting to see, wanting to put it on her head.

A coarse, expelling sound came from Yi Ting's throat as she glared at Lin Bobo.

Lin Bobo forcibly held down Yi Ting's upper body and stuck the hairpin into her fluffy hair. He thought this hairpin was very pretty, just not quite suitable for Hu Xin, so he had taken it on his own initiative.

Yi Ting felt the sweat on Lin Bobo's hands. The damp, sticky touch was like maggots in a sewer, seeming to writhe as they passed over her arm. But she raised her head, and in an infinite loop of fear, she kicked hard at Lin Bobo's chest.

Don't touch me.

Get lost!

Lin Bobo sat on the ground as if startled, knocking over the bowl of food. A humiliated red flushed his face. He spat at Yi Ting and cursed, "Starve, starve to death!"

Yi Ting's hair was a mess. She was an uncontrollable calf who had already gotten the better of Lin Bobo several times. Lin Bobo had an innate fear of Yi Ting's gaze. He picked up the food bowl and fled in disarray.

The room plunged back into darkness after the door closed. Tears streamed from the corners of Yi Ting's eyes, scalding her temples.

She wanted to go home.

Yi Ting huddled in the corner, her eyes shut tight, letting out an unconcealable sob. She heard the whirring of a fan from outside the blocked window, and the ringing of a bicycle bell passing by.

She was only a wall away from freedom, and time was slipping away.

"He's crazy," Yan Junxun was still thinking things over while eating his noodles. "Otherwise, he wouldn't have killed Bai Jingqing. His relationship with Bai Jingqing was very complicated, because Bai Jingqing was still being kept by her sugar daddy during those years."

Shi Shanyan's hand, adding vinegar, didn't stop. "You think they were lovers."

They were sitting at a bustling food stall, and the guy at the next table was shouting out numbers for a drinking game. Smoke billowed from the barbecue stand, where the grill was covered with cuts of Northern Front Chicken and very few vegetables. There was an electric fan beside the stall, churning the stuffy, hot air. The several plastic tables glistened with grease, and beer bottles lay toppled on the ground.

The vibrant, worldly atmosphere of the Old District dispelled the discomfort Yan Junxun had brought back from the crime scene. He held his chopsticks and said, "...He couldn't afford to support Bai Jingqing. He probably couldn't even support himself. Bai Jingqing would never have been his lover." Yan Junxun looked at Shi Shanyan. "Aren't you afraid of sourness?"

"Nope," Shi Shanyan said, twirling his noodles, his words carrying a double meaning. "Vinegar is the most delicious condiment."

Yan Junxun didn't like vinegar. He stirred his noodles and continued, "Regardless of what Bai Jingqing meant to the killer, they did interact. Lixing has very little security. The killer could come and go as he pleased. It wouldn't be hard to get to know Bai Jingqing."

Shi Shanyan said, "He didn't have the money to be a customer at Lixing."

"He could work at Lixing," Yan Junxun thought of Qi Shi. "The easiest way to get close to Bai Jingqing is to be a bodyguard."

However, the profession of a bodyguard was not suitable for the killer; he clearly lacked the talent for it. A waiter was also out of the question. Any job that required long-term interaction with people was unsuitable, as it would quickly expose the killer's expressive deficiencies.

The light screen inside the food stall was small. The owner's 8-year-old son was using it to watch a children's science show. But it was already past midnight, so the owner's wife carried her son away, and a customer switched the light screen to the news channel.

The news reported that Jiang Lian had been dismissed from his post. The alert against the Stagnation Zone Organization would continue, and there would be a regional lockdown next week. Soon, Liu Chen appeared. His annoying face was everywhere, and his affected tone, like his suit, was specially prepared for the camera.

"Exclusive report at midnight," Liu Chen emphasized to the camera. "Exclusive. The killer is still contacting me. He has something to say. I want to hear what he has to say, because he has no fear of what he is doing. How can a person have no fear? I'm very curious about him."

Someone was playing a finger-guessing game, and the noise was so loud it almost drowned out the sound from the light screen.

A guy at the next table shouted to his companion, "The sexual assault cases this guy wrote about before were pretty good. Super detailed, and even had psychological analysis."

Yan Junxun snapped his chopsticks.

That guy said with passion, "It's freedom of the press now, right? He can say whatever he wants. Can the Supervisory Bureau still shut him up?" He slammed his beer mug down with a "clang." "Times have changed!"

Shi Shanyan turned his head and happened to see Liu Chen answering a call.

This guy was always answering his phone. His news was manufactured from phone calls. Other than that, he didn't need to do any investigation; it was his only method of verification.

But strangely, even though it was noisy all around, Shi Shanyan still heard something like the sound of paddling in the few seconds of silence after the call connected. He wanted to listen more closely, but a girl's piercing scream came from the light screen.

The sound was so loud that it not only pierced through Liu Chen's studio but also the food stall, making everyone look over.

The killer didn't speak. There was only the victim's scream.

Yan Junxun felt a subtle, electric shock of pain. In that long scream, he understood the killer's meaning.

The killer was making a show of force to the profiler. This was his trophy, and he was showing it off to the whole world!

But Yan Junxun didn't call for it to stop. He knew that shouting "stop" from here was useless. He wanted to hear clearly whose voice it was—was it the already-murdered Hu Xin, or the currently abducted Yi Ting.

The call was disconnected.

Yan Junxun stood up abruptly and walked toward the light screen amidst the uproar.

"Play it again."

Yan Junxun recited silently, dragging the video's progress bar back. The call connected again. Five seconds of silence, then the screaming began.

No sound of resistance, only screams.

'What the fuck are you doing? Intimidating the victim?'

Yan Junxun kept rewinding the progress bar, standing there and listening repeatedly, until the people at the stall started to complain.

"What are you doing?" The guy at the next table tilted his head up. "Are you nuts?"

'Don't be noisy.'

Yan Junxun focused on the scream. A sound like the fluttering of a moth's wings became the background music to the scream. This sound was very faint, so faint that Yan Junxun wanted to press his ear against the light screen to hear it.

The drunk people started smashing beer bottles, and a few of them stood up, looking at Yan Junxun.

The sound of shattering bottles interfered with Yan Junxun's concentration. He let out a low "fuck" and dragged the progress bar back again.

Seeing that a fight was about to break out, the owner quickly wiped his hands on his apron and shouted at Yan Junxun, "Hey customer, keep it down! Turn the volume down!"

But Yan Junxun felt the answer was within reach. That fluttering sound was very familiar, as if he had heard it not long ago. He tried hard to block out his surroundings, wanting to grasp the flash of light in his mind.

Shi Shanyan blocked Yan Junxun, saying concisely, "The bill."

As he spoke, his gaze swept over the drunks outside, his expression blank.

Amidst the owner's "okay, okay" replies, Yan Junxun heard the fluttering sound again. For a second, he thought it was an after-effect of listening to the video repeatedly, but the next moment, he realized.

"The electric fan," Shi Shanyan grabbed Yan Junxun's wrist, not letting him look elsewhere. "You keep listening."

The fluttering sound sped up, gradually becoming a paddling sound.

It's the electric fan!

This coincided with the geographical analysis that the killer lived in the old business district.

"He still lives here," Yan Junxun said quickly. "Within this area."

Yan Junxun drew lines on a piece of paper. He had memorized the addresses of all the victims in the case. When they appeared in the same picture, the killer's range of activity became very narrow.

Docking Area No. 2 Middle School was very close to the New District, but Yi Ting's home was near the old business district, in a residential community near the Lixing Building.

"Not many people here install air conditioners," Yan Junxun pointed into the darkness toward the even darker home of Hu Xin. "Especially in this kind of elderly community."

Elderly people living alone were very frugal. Even if they had air conditioners, they were reluctant to turn them on, still using electric fans most of the time.

The killer left no personal traces at any of the crime scenes. He was very meticulous in this regard. So Yan Junxun believed that if it were an ordinary, portable electric fan, the killer wouldn't have let its sound appear in the background. Only a sound that had become so integrated into his life that he himself was unaware of it could possibly be captured on recording.

"There's a very old type of fan that's easy to install and remove, usually mounted outside a window. There's another old type that's a ceiling fan, basically mounted on the ceiling," Yan Junxun looked up at their empty ceiling. "A ceiling fan is easy to turn off."

But the killer didn't turn it off.

"If it's mounted outside the window," Yan Junxun crumpled the paper, "he had the window open, yet none of the neighbors heard the victim screaming."

Shi Shanyan blew the dust off a chair and said, "We can't rule out that his neighbors are all deaf."

Hu Xin's neighbor was an empty-nester with poor hearing who always had trouble hearing what people said. The elderly community she lived in was not an exception. Such communities were too common in the old business district. The North-South War had left countless people unemployed, and everyone wanted to run to the Light Rail District during the post-war reconstruction period.

"He doesn't have much money for a new house. There's a high probability he still lives in his original home," Yan Junxun said. "We have to go check those communities."

"Okay, big brother," Shi Shanyan looked at Yan Junxun. "You can go to sleep now."

Yan Junxun was silent for a moment, then said, "His crying out 'mama' in the diary is very strange."

"One's upbringing is very important," Shi Shanyan tilted his head back slightly, stretching his neck. "—for this kind of person."

He had cunningly detached himself again, no longer mentioning his own upbringing.

As Yan Junxun buried himself in his blanket, the screams still echoed in his ears. He lay with his eyes open, without any sleep aid. He could stay like this, wide awake, until dawn. The images in his head were like a TV series; the victims' homes were filled with the stench of blood.

Shi Shanyan's arm was draped over the back of the chair. He asked, "Want me to tell you a bedtime story?"

Yan Junxun turned over to make it look like he was asleep.

"Once upon a time, there was a bear," Shi Shanyan began to speak on his own. "He ran into a tree and died..."

"Stagnation Zone 156's 36809," Yan Junxun's voice was very low. "Tell his story."

Shi Shanyan's thoughts had been circling around little bears, little rabbits, or any other little animal, but then he heard his own designation number. His fingers tapped lightly on the back of the chair, a little caught off guard.

Only a little.