Chapter 720: PUA[1]

Chen Shi said, "Old Peng, you’re too capable. Let me investigate the identity of the deceased!"

"Go ahead!" Peng Sijue didn't care who went to investigate, and then said to Lin Dongxue, "Dongxue, can you talk to Captain Lin about it?"

"No problem."

Chen Shi said, "By the way, can these photos be printed separately?"

"Do it yourself!" As he said this, Peng Sijue left.

Lin Dongxue glanced at the document and asked, "Shall we investigate it now?"

"No, I have a faster way."

Chen Shi separated the photos, and by the time the interrogation was over, Zhang Xiao really didn’t disclose anything. Chen Shi borrowed the interrogation room from the interrogator. Holding a stack of household registration photos in his hands, he asked, "Do you know this person?"

Zhang Xiao squinted for a while and shook his head.

Chen Shi showed him the next picture. "Do you know this person?"

"What is this for, Officer? Are these women missing or killed? I don't even know them!"

"Continue to act..." Chen Shi changed to another photo. "Do you know this person?"

Zhang Xiao's expression changed inadvertently, but he continued to shake his head. "I have never seen her before."

After asking about all of them, Chen Shi was sure it was the third one, and went out to say a few words to Lin Dongxue. Lin Dongxue said, "Surely, this isn’t a good idea!"

"This kid is too cunning. We have to take a strong approach."

"Then I’ll go and ask Captain Peng for the photos."

When Lin Dongxue came back a moment later, the two entered the interrogation room again. Chen Shi leaned against the table and said, "Zhang Xiao, let me show you something good." Then he handed out a photo of the body to him.

"Oh my God!" Zhang Xiao was frightened.

"You should know this corpse, or at least, you know part of it. She’s the person you just identified." Chen Shi held up the photo.

Zhang Xiao mumbled, knowing that there was no way out and relented at last. "Police officer, we didn't kill her!"

"We?" Lin Dongxue raised her eyebrows slightly.

Zhang Xiao sighed and confessed about the situation. The girl was called Linlin and she was the new girlfriend of a certain friend of his. Some time ago, she was killed by someone unknown. The murderer cruelly chopped her into nine pieces and sent them to him and some of his other friends separately.

This story was full of loopholes, and Chen Shi said, "You’re still not being honest? This girl is dead. She was dismembered and the parts sent to all of you. Why didn't any of you call the police instead of putting them into trash bags and disposing of them in the middle of the night? Were you all helping the murderer to destroy the body? I could even suspect that one of you is the murderer!"

"No, no, Linlin actually committed suicide." Zhang Xiao told them the truth in a panic.

"Suicide? Why?"

"I don't know why the girl committed suicide. Women easily take things to heart." His eyes were evasive.

"Mind your language!" Lin Dongxue chided him.

"Police Officer Dongxue, I'm not talking about you. A brainless woman like Linlin can't be compared to you!" Zhang Xiao smiled ingratiatingly but made Lin Dongxue feel even more disgusted.

"In that case, who are your eight friends?" Chen Shi asked.

Zhang Xiao had no choice but to write down their names and contact information one by one. After the interrogation was over, he was released. Chen Shi saw that he started to make calls as soon as he walked out of the door of the Public Security Bureau. Presumably, he was notifying the others.

Chen Shi didn’t call these people directly, but searched for their phone numbers on WeChat. When he looked at their WeChat Moments, all of them seemed to be dragons and phoenixes among humans[2]. The photos posted were of them leaning on luxurious cars, wearing suits and watches and traveling to Southeast Asia, etc. They gave off an aura of being successful, members of the elite and unconventional.

After looking through this, Chen Shi said, "I more or less know who these people are."

"PUA?" Lin Dongxue said.

"Ha, you guessed it!"

"Tch, you’ve acted mysterious about this for so long. Of course, I know about this. When girls venture into the world, they need to know about these bad people."

PUA is the abbreviation of the English term “pick-up artist” and it’s commonly known as the study of seduction. Although its purpose was to help introverted men find true love when it first appeared, it gradually became a collection of tricks for cheating money and sex.

"When I first learned about this kind of thing, I was most shocked that women who account for half of the world's population could be easily attained by people who lived in small dark rooms after they learned these strategies over a few days." Chen Shi said.

"No, this group of people are super thick-skinned and cast extensive nets in order to catch women. There are bound to be one or two who gets tricked." Lin Dongxue sneered. "It's like telecommunications fraud. No matter how ridiculous the scamming messages are, someone is always fooled as long as the base number of messages sent is large. There was a scammer in Beijing who said he was Sun Yat-sen and even scammed more than 200,000... That said, PUA has only been around for the past few years. When a man meets a vixen, he’s fooled faster than a woman."

"Hahaha, it’s because ordinary people are elementary students who follow their feelings in love, and they will be tricked as soon as they meet an ‘expert’."

"This kind of expert is disgusting!"

"It seems that the death of this girl is inseparable from the nine men. The murderer sent the body parts to them, and it feels as though he was calling them to account for their sins."

"'Murderer'? Are you sure that the corpse dismemberer is the murderer?"

"Sorry, I was wrong. Let's look at the corpse again!"

"Captain Peng's autopsy isn’t over yet. Let's find out the identity of the deceased first."

"I'll go and look for Old Peng to let him know. He’ll save some effort if he knows what to look for. I’ll see you at the door later."

The girl’s household registration data showed that her name was Duan Lin and the address on her ID was in Jingzhou. Lin Dongxue made a round of phone calls to various police stations. After receiving the results, it turned out that Duan Lin had obtained a temporary residence permit locally. She was a female worker in a cotton mill.

The staff at the police station also said that the girl had recently disappeared, and that her father had come from her hometown to make a report. For the past two days, he had been holding up a sign in the downtown area, asking if any kind people could provide clues. It was quite pitiful.

"Is there any contact information for her father?"

"Yes, I’ll ask him to go to the Public Security Bureau."

Lin Dongxue said, "No, I'll go and find him!"

Lin Dongxue was about to set off when she found that Chen Shi hadn't arrived yet, so she went to the autopsy room to find him. He was indeed there.

Peng Sijue was studying the dismembered parts and Chen Shi stood beside him, covering his nose with a perfume-scented napkin. His action made Lin Dongxue want to laugh.

"Come here!" Chen Shi beckoned, "I told Old Peng and he checked again. There were indeed some findings. Old Peng, I’ll leave it to you to talk about them!"

Peng Sijue picked up the corpse’s right hand, and the blood vessels on top had already begun to turn dark green. “The shape of the knife wound here is slightly different. The wound was quite messy. I didn’t pay attention to it before. I checked it carefully again and it seemed as though it had been cut with a blade… The one who divided the corpse deliberately cut along where the blade had cut, making it difficult for us to discover that there was originally a wound here."

"Suicide by cutting the wrist?"

"I can only say that it had been cut by a blade. The body had been broken down in this way and many of the 'parts' are missing. Also, with the severe decay, it’s impossible to speculate whether it was suicide or homicide."

"From this, we can see one thing!" Chen Shi said, "The man who divided the corpse really isn’t the murderer. If he was the murderer, doing so will only expose the fact of his murder. He divided the corpse and sent it to nine men to convey a kind of Information. The person who killed this girl is among the nine of them... Whether she committed suicide or was killed, in the eyes of the corpse dismemberer, she had been killed by them!"

"Go somewhere else to show off. Don't disturb my work." Peng Sijue said, giving him the cold shoulder.

1. AKA Pick-up artist. Written in English. As with all the instances henceforth.

2. A man among men.