Episode 8 Chapter 79 Bad News
I was finally woken up by the alarm clock. I felt dizzy after getting up. My eyes were also stinging, probably because I didn't get enough sleep. The first thing I did after getting up was to send a text message to Shi Hu. Because it was still early, I was afraid that he was still sleeping, so I didn't call him. Who knew that he called me half a minute after the text message. He asked me in detail what happened at night. The person on the other end of the phone began to worry, asking if something was happening.
Later he told me to go to work first, and he and Shan Lanjin would come to our house after some time to see if they could find out what the problem was. I went to work as usual, but was thrown into disarray. I washed up and had breakfast as usual before going there, because this time I didn't have to be there at 7:30, so I had more time. When I arrived at the funeral home, it was a quarter past eight, just in time for work. When I entered the office, Xu Nuoyi was already there.
As soon as I entered, he complained that I worked the night shift for a whole night and it was fine to have a day off, but it was hard for him. I asked him what was wrong, why he complained so much after just one day of not seeing him, he said that the file records were robbed and many corpses' information was burned, and Director Gao scolded him for the whole afternoon yesterday, if he was a woman, he would have cried there a long time ago.
When I heard about when this happened, Xu Nuoyi asked how he knew. They were all unclaimed bodies. He said he couldn't figure it out. These unclaimed bodies were taking up space in the cold storage, and they were not allowed to be cremated, and no one came to claim them. Besides, they were not involved in any case and could not be moved. Wouldn't it be better to just melt them in the furnace or dispose of them? Why did they have to be kept in the cold storage and their information had to be preserved? Now look who is so bored as to come and steal these things, causing him to be scolded for nothing.
As the saying goes, the speaker may not mean it, but the listener may take it seriously. I was very sensitive to these things about the funeral home, so I tried to ask Xu Nuoyi if he knew when these unclaimed bodies were brought into the funeral home and why they were kept. Xu Nuoyi thought about it and said that it had been a few years, and it was hard to say how long it had been. As for why they were kept, he also wanted to know, and he didn't know what the senior management of the funeral home thought.
That means he doesn't know. I asked Xu Nuoyi how to distinguish the unclaimed files from the fake ones. Xu Nuoyi said that the unclaimed ones would have the words "unclaimed" written on the cover and would be mixed in with all the files in chronological order. The purpose of my asking was to see what was special about these files, but I couldn't tell Xu Nuoyi directly, so I said I would sort them out to see which ones were lost.
Xu Nuoyi asked me if I had eaten too much. It was impossible to sort it out unless I took all the files and compared them with the bodies in the refrigerator one by one. I'm afraid I can't finish it in a month. Moreover, the funeral home didn't use electronic records from the beginning, and some years were not in the database at all.
I said how can I know if I don't try, so I went to the archive room. I told Xu Nuoyi to tell me if there is anything, and he can't do it alone, right? He said he would, so I smiled and left. When I got to the archive room, I started to look through the archives. It was just that the archives from the years when the funeral home was just built were piled together. I flipped through them casually. Although some were stolen, not all of them were stolen. After all, these files were mixed together and needed to be identified one by one. I flipped through a few unclaimed ones and couldn't see any clues. They were nothing more than records of when they entered the museum, whether the family could be contacted, how they were classified and handled, etc. Some had been cremated, and some bodies were still preserved. I deliberately took note of the bodies that were still preserved and took pictures of them with my mobile phone.
I knew what would happen if someone found out, but I thought this matter seemed very important. There were too many files, so it was impossible for me to look through them all, so I could only selectively look through some of them and then returned to the office. I felt that I had to talk to Shi Hu and the others about this matter to see what they thought. I also learned from Xu Nuoyi that the funeral home did not report the theft of the files, but resolved it internally.
Maybe because of the relationship between me and Old Man Nie, Director Gao did not look for me or ask me anything about the files. Xu Nuoyi felt that he was treated unfairly and kept saying that he was a scapegoat. I didn't say anything. He was just like that. He was actually a pretty good person.
I sent a text message to Shi Hu about this, because a phone call would be too conspicuous, and I also asked him not to call me about this.
The next day went smoothly, and there was nothing to do at the funeral home until Shi Hu called me after work and told me to come back as soon as possible after work, as he and Shan Lanjin were both at my house. His tone didn't sound good, and he said it was not good to talk about this over the phone, so I should talk about it when I got back, and he said they had already bought me a box lunch, and I might be a little cold when I came back, but time was tight, so I just had to make do with it.
After hearing what Shi Hu said, I became even more anxious, so I rushed back home after get off work. When I got home, only Shi Hu and Shan Lanjin were at home. It seemed that they were waiting for me there. I came in, put down my things, took off my coat, and asked them what was going on and what happened.
Shi Hu said that they had two pieces of bad news and asked which one they wanted to hear first. I said that since both were bad news, we should tell the worst one first, so that we wouldn't be surprised when we heard the second one.
Shi Hu said the worst news was that all the evidence at Lu Fei's scene pointed to me. They found the murder weapon in the toilet in the bathroom, the wound matched the knife edge, there were my fingerprints on the handle, and a large number of my fingerprints were found on Lu Fei's body. This was the result of their overnight work, and the police station had already planned to temporarily detain me as a suspect.
I think this is indeed bad news. I haven't even seen the knife, how could it be the murderer who killed Lu Fei? After listening to Shi Hu, I asked what the second bad news was. Shi Hu said that the second bad news was on the twelfth floor, and he asked me to go up and see it myself.
Then we went to the twelfth floor. When Shi Hu opened the door, I saw a horrifying scene. The whole room was full of puppet fragments. Shi Hu led me in. He said that after I told him that someone had left me a note asking me to come up to the twelfth floor, and that I had gone to the wrong place last night and heard some strange noises, he and Shan Lanjin went upstairs to take a look, and they saw this scene.
He said that these puppets were chopped into pieces by a knife, which means that all the sounds I heard last night were real. Someone was doing all this, and it was not my hallucination. Shi Hu pointed to a machete on the ground and asked me to pay attention to the knife marks on the floor. They were indeed caused by the machete when the puppets were chopped.
I said a woman in high heels was chopping a doll with a machete? Shi Hu said that this could not be confirmed for the time being. As for the latter incident, it was indeed bad news, but less bad than the first one. As for the second one, Shi Hu told me to be more careful recently. The situation is unclear now and my life safety is in some danger.
As for the first one, I asked Shi Hu how to deal with it. Shi Hu said that the evidence was irrefutable and pointed to me. He and Shan Lanjin had found my alibi, so for the time being, there was only an injunction, and the detention was cancelled. I asked what evidence. Shi Hu said that the forensic identification of Lu Fei's death time was around 6:30 pm, which meant that when I arrived there, he had been dead for two hours.
And from the surveillance footage they retrieved, it seemed that I had not gone out since I came back in the afternoon, and I did not go out until around 7:40. After that, I stopped near the access control gate. Although my behavior was strange, because I had sufficient evidence of my absence, the evidence was inconsistent and could not constitute a detention investigation. They just needed me to cooperate with the investigation, not leave here, and maintain 24-hour communication so that the police could find me at any time.
This result is pretty good, and Shi Hu and Shan Ranjin made efforts in places I couldn't see, so I'm very grateful to them. As for what Shi Hu said about my strange behavior at the access control, could it be when I was talking to Lu Fei? Shi Hu said they retrieved that part of the video, so I'll take a look myself.
