Officer Liao then introduced the male police officer beside Dr. Luo.

“This is Bai Yidao,” he said. “He’s our director’s son…”

“Old Liao!” interrupted Bai Yidao. “Why did you have to mention my father? Is that all I am to you? The director’s son?”

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Officer Liao smiled apologetically. “It just rolled off my tongue, that’s all.”

Bai Yidao eyed me up and down, then smiled sardonically and said, “So this is the special consultant sent to help us, huh? Looks pretty young. Well, nice to meet you!”

He then stretched out a hand towards me. I shook the hand without thinking, only to realize too late that he was doing that ridiculous alpha-male move by gripping my hand tightly and not letting go. His grip was like a gorilla’s—it felt as if my bones were going to fracture. I had to struggle really hard just to free my hand. I must’ve looked like an idiot to the rest of the room then.

Luo Weiwei was overjoyed by the sight. She even chuckled—and not very discreetly too. Officer Liao’s eyebrows furrowed and scolded, “Yidao! This is not the time and place to be so childish!”

“I just wanted to test the special consultant’s grip. Sorry about that!” Bai Yidao smiled, completely devoid of any apologetic tone.

I was filled with fury inside, but I gritted my teeth and was determined not to show any emotions. I thought to myself, Just you wait, you asshole! You’ll get your comeuppance!

“Uh… Please take a seat,” said Officer Liao, trying to smooth out the awkward scene as much as possible. “Now that everyone’s here, I’ll briefly summarize the case before we start the meeting. And please pour the guests some coffee…”

We all sat down at a round table. I noticed how the other police officers looked at us scornfully, probably doubting if we could ever amount to anything, especially Bai Yidao, who was constantly whispering things into Luo Weiwei’s ear and then occasionally glancing at us—probably talking shit about us again.

“That arrogant bastard! I’ll show him who’s boss!” cursed Huang Xiaotao. She then turned to me and asked in a gentler tone, “Is your hand okay, Song Yang?”

“Don’t worry,” I replied. “I’m not that delicate, you know.” In truth, I was still secretly massaging my hurting hand under the table.

Dali took a quick glance at Luo Weiwei and chided, “What a conceited woman! Does she think that she’s all that? She’s not even half as charming as Xiaotao-jiejie!”

“Don’t compare me with that bitch, you idiot!” snapped Huang Xiaotao.

“Ah, yes… you’re right,” nodded Dali. “You’re on a completely different level, Xiaotao-jiejie!”

Officer Liao asked someone to pull up the curtain, then he turned on the projector and began explaining the details pertaining to the case. I noticed how much better equipped the Wuqu City police station was compared to Nanjiang. But that’s only to be expected since Director-General Cheng, the provincial chief, had risen through the ranks here, so Wuqu was something like his home base. Naturally they would receive special treatment compared to Nanjiang.

This time the victims were a family of three—a pair of husband and wife and the husband’s mother. The husband worked as an executive in a wholesale distribution company. He had a close and loving relationship with his mother, who was already eighty years old and was bound to a wheelchair due to arthritis in her legs. The relationship between the husband and wife was also said to be very harmonious. They were never seen raising their voices at each other, much less physically fight. The pair had a twelve-year-old daughter who was sent to a boarding school far away from the city. Because of that, she was able to escape this horrible fate.

The family lived in an old-fashioned house. Three days ago, a neighbor heard a loud noise in the middle of the night coming from the victims’ house. It sounded as if there was a violent fight going on between the husband and wife. Then, sounds of objects crashing and breaking were heard.

This neighbor often played mahjong with the husband’s mother. She went over to the house to tell them to keep the volume down, but no matter how many times she knocked on the door, no one came to open it. The next thing she saw was the old lady falling from the second floor while still in her wheelchair. She was presumed to have died on impact, her body was full of broken glass pieces, and there were chopsticks sticking out of her two eye sockets.

The neighbor realized that something was very wrong, so she rushed over to a neighborhood security guard to make them pry open the door. When they finally got into the house, they realized that the whole place was filled with the heady stench of blood, and to quote the neighbor herself, “It was as if the whole house was painted with fresh blood.”

The wife was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. She was stabbed so many times that her whole body was mangled. Half of her face was torn away from her skull, and it hung near her neck. Beside her body, there was a meat cleaver.

The husband’s death was even more gruesome. When he was found, his body was standing beside the sink, but his head had fallen into the sink with the eyes still wide open. The whole kitchen was almost flooded with blood.

Like the case from three months ago, the murders happened in a locked room. no one could’ve came into the scene from outside. The preliminary conclusion was that the husband and wife had a violent fight and temporarily lost their sanity. This caused the wife to stab her mother-in-law in the eyes with chopsticks, then shoved her down the window from the second floor. After that, the husband and wife then stabbed each other with knives. The husband thought that the wife had died, so he went into the kitchen to clean his wounds, but the wife attacked him from behind and decapitated the husband. By the time, the wife had lost too much blood, so she dropped dead after only managing to walk a few steps away from the kitchen.

They had thoroughly questioned the patrol officers responsible for that neighborhood and the neighbors who discovered the bodies, but found nothing worth following and no one suspicious. The forensics team had also tested the food that they ate before their deaths, but found no suspicious substances or drugs in them. And that was how things stood—a complete dead end with no clues to follow through and absolutely no sign of progress.

“How did you determine the sequence of their deaths?” I asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” sneered Dr. Luo. “I was the one who made that conclusion. The husband had always been a good son to his mother, and witnesses stated that their relationships had always been loving, so it would be ridiculous to suppose that the husband plunged chopsticks into his own mother’s eyes, wouldn’t it? Besides, the wife’s fingerprints were found on the chopsticks. Apart from that, the husband couldn’t kill his wife and then hacked his own head off his neck, could he? This is all common sense! You shouldn’t presume to be the special consultant if you couldn’t even think of this.”

“Special Consultant Song, did you notice anything?” asked Officer Liao.

“Please just call me Song Yang,” I said. “Personally, I think we have to start from square one with the investigation. It seems that you’re heading in the wrong direction.”

“How presumptuous!” Luo Weiwei slammed the table. “I’ve been a coroner for six years, and you think that I would make such a rookie mistake? Hmph, you speak as if you can make the victims rise from the dead and open their mouths and talk, Great Detective Song!”

“Why don’t you wait and see, then?” I challenged. “I’ll prove it to you that I can do it.”

The rest of the police officers in the room all turned to me with fascination, their muffled whispers tinged with ridicule.

I guess it was to be expected, since we were strangers who came into their territory and yet they were suddenly ordered to give up their authority to us. Humans and animals weren’t so different in this regard. The hostility in the air was not lost on me even from the first moment that I stepped foot in here.

“Has an autopsy been performed on the victims?” I asked.

“No, of course not!” answered Dr. Luo in a particularly acrid tone. “We were just about to start, but Director-General Cheng suddenly called and told us not to touch the corpses before the special consultant arrives.”

“Has the daughter been informed?” asked Huang Xiaotao.

Officer Liao shook his head.

“Her relatives and family friends keep it a secret from her,” he explained. “She’s attending school in another city, so she hasn’t heard of any news about her family’s death yet. I can’t imagine the pain that she must be going through. She lost both her parents and her grandmother in a single day…”

He then let out a long sigh. Judging from his age, Officer Liao probably was a parent himself, so it was unsurprising that he would be especially sympathetic to the victims’ daughter.

“What about the victims’ social circle?” asked Huang Xiaotao. “Did you find anyone who had been in conflict with any of them?”

“We’ve checked that,” said Officer Liao. “But we found nothing worth investigating further there. You can read the detailed statements of the people we questioned later.”

After that, we had nothing else to ask, so Officer Liao announced that the meeting was over and that from then on, the special team that consisted of the four of us would conduct our own independent investigation while the rest of the task force would assist in any way possible.

“From now on,” announced Officer Liao, “my position as the leader of the task force will be handed over to Supervisor Huang.”

“Supervisor Huang?” Dali was shocked, turning his eyes towards Huang Xiaotao. “But I thought you were a Superintendent?”

“Well, I solved two huge cases in a row, you see,” Huang Xiaotao explained, beaming with pride, “so I was promoted to Third Class Supervisor recently, and the official documents have also been approved!”

She then turned to me and patted my shoulder, then said, “Great God of Detectives Song! Please give me your protection and more promotions from now on!”

“If you give me more offerings and burn more incense in my honor, then maybe I’ll make your wishes come true!” I joked.

“No problem!” said Huang Xiaotao. “I’ll treat you to the best roasted duck in Wuqu City later!”

Although Third Class Supervisor was only one rank higher than First Class Superintendent, it sounded much cooler and more authoritative. I remembered how Officer Sun rose from a mid-ranking officer to a director of the city police station in just a few years after he cooperated with Grandpa. I wondered if the same thing would happen to Huang Xiaotao?

That gave me an idea. Wouldn’t it be great if I could help Huang Xiaotao climb up to the rank of Commissioner? Then anytime a difficult case arose, the Commissioner herself would be asking for my help—how cool would that be?