Chapter 1: The Corpse in the Rainy Night

That night, a sudden rainstorm hit.

“Team Leader Shao, are you sure it’s the right move to seek out that guy?” Amid thunder and rain hammering the railing, a thin, sharp voice carried down the corridor. “You sure it’s him we’re after? The kid’s got screws loose—why else would he end up in a psych ward!”

Someone’s leather shoes echoed down the hall—tap, tap—then a woman’s voice followed. “Wu Meng, he’s self-taught but has solved plenty of major cases with us. It’s just…”

“Just that on one case,” Team Leader Shao broke in, “he arrested himself. He was convinced he was the killer. But in reality, the real culprit’s still at large, never caught to this day.”

A nurse chipped in, “He’s delusional.”

“Team Leader, do you think the real killer from that case could be—” the woman started.

“It’s hard to say,” Team Leader Shao replied. “Let’s just go see this so-called top-notch outsider for ourselves.”

And so the three of them stood right in front of me. I peered through the bars at the two men and one woman, sizing them up closely. The sharp voice belonged to a male nurse from the psych ward—I’d dealt with him plenty. The other two I’d never met: one, a man in his forties; the other, a woman just shy of thirty.

“What’s the case?” I cut straight to the point.

Team Leader Shao arched a brow, eyeing me with what felt like approval. “Mary, get the paperwork started.”

“That’s it? We’re really doing this?” The nurse’s disbelief lingered.

Shao gave him a nod. “He’s exactly the one I came here for.”

Midnight.

Summer storms come as fast as they go, but this one just wouldn’t let up. Team Leader Shao drove, bringing Mary and me to the crime scene. The killer had clearly picked this rainy night on purpose—the downpour washing away nearly all the evidence. All that was left… was a corpse.

Out in the western suburbs, a railway track cut through the darkness. To keep kids from playing too close, chain-link fences lined both sides, and it was right up on the top of the fence that a woman’s body was dangling. She was wedged into the narrow gap of the metal links, her body stuck fast so she wouldn’t slip down.

The entire corpse swayed violently in the gusting storm. Her shoes kept thumping against the metal with a dull thud—like footsteps in the night. Under the pale yellow glow from the streetlights on either side, the effect was eerie as hell.

The body was first discovered by two power line repairmen. A sudden downpour had knocked out the area’s lines. Worried the cables might drape across the tracks and cause a wreck, headquarters had sent them out in the rain to fix things. When they arrived, it was pitch black.

You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and thunder cracked overhead. Their flashlights barely lit anything in the rain. The two men had to edge along by the fence, inch by inch, checking the lines above them. Thankfully the power was already cut, so they didn’t have to worry about getting electrocuted.

Finally, they spotted a broken wire. One cable was draped over the fence, its end hanging close to the tracks. Thankfully it hadn’t wrapped around the rails yet. The two of them yanked the wire off the fence and went to call their boss.

But just then, one worker asked, “Liu, did you hear that? That tapping sound, like someone’s coming our way.”

Liu quickly swept his flashlight left and right. Nobody there. He swore, “You’re hearing things. Who the hell would be out here in the middle of nowhere…”

But before he could finish, even Liu heard the distinct tap-tap-tap in the rain. There was no way that sound came from the rain—besides, muddy ground like this shouldn’t echo footsteps at all. Was someone actually walking along the tracks?

Liu tried to shine his flashlight up and down the rails, but then a sudden bolt of lightning lit the night—and that’s when he saw it: not far away, a corpse twisting on the chain-link fence. The two men bolted and ran a full kilometer before they dared stop and call the police.

Watching the two men, both still jumpy, I wiped rainwater off my face. Even in a raincoat, I was drenched. I squatted down to check the body: no blood, no leftover evidence.

More important, there weren’t any footprints. On a muddy field like this, every step should leave a hole, but around the corpse there wasn’t a single print.

The closest ones belonged to the two repairmen, four or five meters away. So how did the killer manage to hang the body up so high on the fence, then leave without leaving a trace? And was this even the original crime scene?

“Have you finished examining the scene?” Team Leader Shao asked. “I’m going to have them bring the body down.”

I nodded.

“Transport the body back for an autopsy,” Shao ordered grimly, then added, “though it seems the killer already beat us to it.”

I frowned, voicing my doubt. “Team Leader Shao, I remember your fiancée—she’s brilliant, even has her own custom toolkit for field autopsies. Why isn’t she here?”

Shao let out a long sigh, as if something weighed on him. Finally he said, “It’s a young person’s world now. Maybe one day that toolkit will end up with your unit. But let’s not dwell on that. How did you know who I was?”

“Team Leader Shao, and Mary.” I glanced at the woman with the backpack. “You two are famous. How could I not know you? But why bring me in? I’m just some guy with delusional disorder.”

Mary broke in, “It’s called guilt delusion or sometimes criminal delusion. Patients believe they’ve committed some great sin or crime and deserve to be punished, all without any real reason. But you—you’re not baseless. You use imagination to track down the killer, to reconstruct how it was done. It’s almost like you really did it yourself.”

I scratched my head, puzzled. “So none of those people were my victims after all?”

Team Leader Shao stopped Mary. “Don’t tease him, you’ll trigger an episode. Anyway, tell us your thoughts.”

I’d been in the psych hospital for months now. Day after day, the boredom made me feel practically dead inside. I shut my eyes and let the thunder and lightning roll, thinking hard about who the murderer could be.

The one thing I hated most was women—because one had abandoned me. She carried my child but wouldn’t have it. She left me, said I was worthless. Since then, I’ve hated every woman. And I guess she was right—I really am worthless; I survive now just picking through garbage.

The killer is a homeless man, about forty years old, with long, greasy hair. He hardly ever cuts it—he doesn’t have the time or money. He favors black, and his fingernails are long and filthy.” I opened my eyes and spoke to everyone in the room.

“How do you know all that?” Mary stared at me, stunned.

“Imagination,” I grinned, then added, “I checked the body—the wounds are ragged, definitely not from any sharp knife.”

Team Leader Shao clapped me on the shoulder, then addressed the rest of the team. “Find this homeless guy anywhere in the city. If he did it, there’s no way he could have escaped town!”

He shook his head, frustrated. “The rain washed everything away. No, there was barely any evidence here at all—that’s why we brought you in. Looks like you’ve been in the hospital for a while. Help us solve this case and I’ll get you out. Deal?”

“Consider it done!” I snapped off a salute.

The psych ward was never where I belonged. My kind of guilt delusion isn’t violent, and sometimes they even let me get some fresh air in the yard. But everyone around me was either unstable or a hot-tempered nurse. Some would stare at a rock for hours, others would eat dirt all day. There were even some severely disturbed ones locked up, but I’ve had barely any contact with them.

“Still,” I sighed to Shao, “we can’t say for sure where the killing started or how the murderer left the scene.”

“As long as we catch the homeless man, the rest will follow,” Shao replied.

As he spoke, a train’s headlights swept closer, rumbling between the stretches of chain-link fence. Shao’s eyes lingered on the passing train—railway, fence, broken wires, vanished footprints, a homeless man. This case… it was getting interesting.

“The autopsy report is in!” someone called out.

“Bring it here!” Shao shouted back.

A phone appeared in Shao’s hand. He studied the screen for a long time, brow furrowed, before he spoke. “This was the original crime scene. That woman died no more than two hours ago. It took us an hour to get here—the workers took at least thirty minutes to spot her and alert the police. So that means…”

“When they found the body!” I finished. “The killer was still right here at the scene!”