Lin Dongxue said, "Your reasoning ability is superb! Teach me!"

"No need. Your investigative ability is much better than before."

"How can I compare with you though?" Lin Dongxue whispered sweetly.

"Okay, okay, I'll teach you." Chen Shi looked around. "Do you see the blue house over there?"

"I do, what's wrong?"

Chen Shi said deeply, "This house caught fire three years ago."

"How do you know?"

Chen Shi laughed. "Because I was passing by back then. I called the firefighters over as well.”

"How is that reasoning? You’re playing with me, huh?" Lin Dongxue raised her fist.

"Okay, okay, don’t hit me. We should go to the next high building."

Lin Dongxue pointed to a building in the distance. "That one? God, we still need to walk a long way. How about going by car?"

"Let's walk. Maybe we’ll be able to find some clues on the way over."

"Haii, why doesn’t Long’an have any superheroes that punish evil? It’d be nice if we could ask superheroes to do such laborious work."

"It's better not to have superheroes."

"Why?"

"When there are superheroes, there are super villains. Everything in the world is balanced. Let's go!"

"So, if us police are a little stupid, the bad guys will be a little stupid as well?"

"Haha, you can implement your own ideals."

"That’s a roundabout way of saying that I’m stupid." Lin Dongxue, who was walking behind Chen Shi, kicked him from behind.

On the way to the building, the two of them suddenly saw a group of school children playing with a balloon. The balloon had already deflated quite a bit but hadn’t popped. Chen Shi immediately stopped the child and said, "Child, where did you get the balloon from?"

The child looked at Chen Shi and was a little scared. He was about to escape. Chen Shi grabbed his arm and he started wailing immediately.

Lin Dongxue said softly, "Can you tell Elder Sister where you picked up the balloon? Here, Elder Sister will give you a piece of candy to eat." She took out a piece of chewing gum.

The child didn’t accept it and pointed to the front saying, "There!"

"Can you give the balloon to Elder Sister?"

"No, I found it first!"

"Can Elder Sister buy it from you?"

"Then give me five yuan."

Lin Dongxue didn’t have any change. Chen Shi fished out five coins and gave them to him and the child happily ran away with his companions.

The two walked towards the area that the child had pointed towards and passed through an alley where there was a courtyard formed by surrounding buildings. It was surrounded by garbage and had messy graffiti on the walls. A solitary black bag had fallen onto the ground.

Chen Shi put on his gloves and opened it. A rancid smell from the corpse floated out. He said, "Yes! We found another bag!"

"Let’s hurry up and bring it back."

At that time, a press conference was being held in the bureau. Lin Qiupu answered questions raised by various media reporters one by one. Of course, most of it were official words meant to smooth over the situation.

Back at the bureau, Old Zhang was waiting for them at the door and said, "Come in quickly. Don't let the reporters see, or they’ll ask questions again.”

"Captain Lin is still entertaining reporters?" Lin Dongxue asked.

"Yeah, the questions get trickier than the last. The matter has already become a big scandal. The chief has ordered that the case be solved within seven days. Captain Lin had also responded to the reporters in the same way. If we can’t solve it during this timeframe, the second team will lose a lot of face."

Chen Shi replied, "Seven days is enough!"

Old Zhang said with a smile, "If Little Chen says so, then my heart will be reassured."

"I speculate that the murder occurred last night. Most hotel surveillance will be overwritten after seven days. If it cannot be solved within seven days, there may be no evidence left."

"Hotel?"

"Old Zhang, I'll tell you later!"

By this time, including the two bags found in the morning, four bags of corpse fragments had been found, one after the other. The remains were more or less assembled and only the most critical part was missing - The head.

As Chen Shi expected, the first breakthrough in the murder case was the source of the balloons. Lin Qiupu had already sent someone to investigate.

Chen Shi asked to take a look at the corpse and went to the forensic laboratory. He saw the broken corpse on the autopsy table. The female body had been cut into dozens of pieces. He picked up a piece and looked at the edges. He asked, "Was she sawed apart?"

"I don't know what kind of saw was used. I’ve already asked someone to buy a pig and bring it back so that we can do an experiment." Peng Sijue said.

"When you’re done, I'll take a pound of pork belly back!"

Peng Sijue rolled his eyes at him, "Look at the corpse's palm."

When he opened the palm and looked at it, he saw that the entire palm was blackened, as if it had been burnt by fire. A closer look revealed that the murderer had first cut it with a knife and then burnt it with fire. The fingerprints and palm prints were completely destroyed.

Chen Shi picked up the broken hand and inspected the edges under the light, saying, "The fire was very focused. The edge of the palm is hardly damaged. It should be something like a blowtorch. The kind with the canisters used in western restaurants."

"The killer didn't want us to find out the identity of the victim."

“We probably won’t be able to find the head either."

The two looked at the place where the missing head belonged for a moment before Chen Shi asked, "What about other findings?"

"There are more than a dozen injuries on the body that were sustained while she was alive. They’re concentrated on the legs, ribs, and buttocks. Most of them were cut with sharp tools, but there were no fatal injuries. I suspect that she died from the loss of blood. Her hands and ankles show traces of being bound. One of her nipples was cut off and there are signs of sexual assault in both the vagina and anus."

"Was there-”

"There aren’t any traces of semen. The killer was quite cautious. In addition, the deceased was injected with a large amount of a type of methamphetamine, which is commonly known as the drug called ‘ice’. Needle wounds were found around the collarbone."

Chen Shi, who was always calm, also frowned. "A carnivalesque sexual abuse case... There have been no such cases before. At least not in Long’an anyway."

"Because the corpse has been broken up like this, it’s difficult to determine the exact time of death. The preliminary judgment was around twenty hours ago, between 8 and 12 o'clock last night."

"Were there any stomach contents?"

Peng Sijue actually smiled grimly. "The murderer turned the stomach bag inside out and washed it clean. It seems that he knew that what the deceased ate would expose him. My men are testing the intestinal contents of the deceased and the residual components in the stomach."

Chen Shi walked around the body, thinking about what else had been left out. He raised the hand of the deceased to examine it. He reached out and gestured; Peng Sijue understood and passed the magnifying glass into his hand.

Chen Shi used the magnifying glass to look at the fingernails of the deceased for a while, and then looked at it under the light, saying, "Two layers of nail polish. The upper layer is newly painted..."

He smelled the corpse. In addition to the pungent odor of the internal organs, he carefully identified a perfume smell. "She had put on perfume."

Then he checked the feet of the deceased. "She wore high heels when she was alive... From the shape of her feet and legs, she doesn't usually wear high heels... This was a sudden date. It may have been the first time that they met. The deceased and the killer have widely different social positions. You can see that the victim was trying very hard to please the killer. Perhaps it was a male god[1] like an idol or something?"

Chen Shi closed his eyes and imagined a high-end hotel, in which the meticulously dressed-up ordinary girl was very nervous and excited to have dinner with the male god in her heart. In his imagination, the faces of the two were blurred.

After eating dinner, the male god showed his "treasure" to the girl. The girl was very afraid because it was a drug, but the male god still asked her or forced her to try it.

Under the influence of drugs, the two began to let go of their restraints and misgivings and did some crazy things. Gradually, the girl found that the scale of this madness was getting bigger and bigger and that he was hurting her.

"Blowjob." Chen Shi said with keen eyes. "It was a blowjob."

1. Guys who are popular, classically good-looking and widely adored. E.g. How people thought about David Beckham, Brad Pitt, etc.