Eyes that are the same as those of evil

Chapter 211 Unexplained Motives 1
Tan Jia described this somewhat strange dream over the phone.

Her previous dreams were all complete fragments, but this dream was more like a brief flashback, as if a fragment had been cut out of several frames. She didn't have continuous time to observe more information in the dream.

"The deceased was a woman, probably quite young, with hair a little longer than shoulder-length, blood on her head, wearing short sleeves, and what appeared to be a watch on her wrist. Her face was relatively small, while the murderer's hands were large, completely covering the lower half of her face, and it was as if the killer was pressing her face down with the base of his thumb."

"The crime scene should be a narrow alley, with a foul smell and almost no bright lights from the colorful signs. But not far away, I don't know if it was a street lamp or the logo of a building directly opposite that was too bright, some light came through, so I could barely see the deceased staring wide-eyed and dying with his eyes open."

Zheng Yan: "An alleyway directly opposite tall buildings? That's too big a scope. Are there any other special clues?"

"No. I didn't even see the deceased's face clearly."

She was on the phone when there was a knock on the door.

Tan Jia tensed up instinctively, feeling a sense of dread, as if she were back in her guesthouse room, about to be murdered by a killer.

Then it dawned on her that Lin Zhiyue must have been awakened by hearing her voice.

She got out of bed, opened the door, and gestured for him to come in. Then she continued talking to Zheng Yan on the phone: "The killer's emotions at that moment made it seem as if killing the victim was a very enjoyable and satisfying thing."

"What are the killer's characteristics? Besides having large hands, what is their height and build like? When they bent down and pressed their hand against the victim's face, did you feel that they completely covered the victim's body shape?"

She recalled, "Yes, I could sense that the deceased was easy for the murderer to deal with."

Zheng Yan pondered for a moment, making rustling noises, probably getting dressed. Then a door slammed shut, and he said in a low voice, "I'm coming to pick you up. Let's investigate where the crime scene is."

The priority is still to find the body.

Tan Jia tried hard to recall and described the environment of the dream again: "A relatively narrow alley, the road surface was uneven, and the faint light from the opposite side would cast specific shadows on the ground due to the obstruction of the walls on both sides, illuminating a limited area..."

"What kind of shadows?" Lin Zhiyue suddenly asked. "Different alley entrances and different light sources will create different shadow projection effects. I've drawn many of them."

She looked over, and a few seconds later said into the phone, "Captain Zheng, Lin Zhiyue might be able to help find the crime scene."

Zheng Yan fell silent, then asked strangely, "You live together?"

...

Putting everything else aside, Lin Zhiyue has excellent eyesight and is quite good at drawing.

Based on Tan Jia's repeated descriptions, he drew three pictures. Simple lines can outline a very three-dimensional space. After seeing them, you can immediately imagine a dark and cramped alleyway, like the garbage alley where the protagonist being chased hides in a Hong Kong drama.

But it was nighttime when the incident occurred, and apart from the face of the deceased so close at hand, everything was blurry. Tan Jia couldn't tell which alleyway was the background in her dream.

Zheng Yan frowned as well. The alleys all looked pretty much the same. Without any special clues, how could they find the real crime scene among the hundreds or thousands of alleys in the city?

He looked at each picture one by one, digging out alleys similar to those in the pictures from his memory. When he saw the third picture, he exclaimed, "Oh!"

Then he took out his phone and searched for restaurants on a food delivery app.

Tan Jia: "...Don't tell me you're suddenly hungry and want to order takeout."

"Of course not. You think I'm as greedy as Xiao Chen? The angle and lighting of this picture remind me of a place. When my wife and I first got married, we would go there every few days to eat fish. There was also a breakfast shop there, and their radish cakes and meat cakes were delicious."

It sounds no different from Xiao Chen's.

But Tan Jia didn't say it aloud, looking at the shop photos he had selected on the food delivery app. The photos not only showed the storefront but also the location of the shop across an alleyway, an alleyway that looked very similar to the third picture Lin Zhiyue had drawn.

"Is this the place you're looking for?" Zheng Yan asked.

“I’m not sure,” Tan Jia stared at it for a while, then said, “Let’s go to the site and see for ourselves.”

Even if she can't pinpoint the location, there might still be many clues left at the crime scene that could prove a murder occurred there.

If you're lucky, the bodies might still be left where they were.

So at six o'clock in the morning, Zheng Yan drove with two temporary workers to the old alley behind Guijin Road.

Then, they actually found a body in one of the alleys filled with garbage cans.

The upper half of her face resembled the deceased in her dream, and the bruises on the lower half of her face, such as pinching her cheeks and covering her mouth, also matched.

Zheng Yan stood next to the body and made a phone call, telling Tan Ming and the others to come over quickly and bring Lao Li along.

Tan Jia covered his nose and looked around. This place must have been used as a garbage dump for many years. The large garbage cans were almost unrecognizable, and sour, rotten garbage water was dripping from them, flowing out along the road.

“This isn’t the primary crime scene,” she said, frowning. “It’s different from the place in my dream; there wasn’t this stench in my dream.”

“It was a body disposal,” Zheng Yan said after finishing the call. “The garbage destroyed some of the clues. If you hadn’t dreamed about it first, the body might have been moved unintentionally by the time everyone came to throw away the garbage or the garbage truck came to take it away, or it might have rotted here until it was discovered. And by then, with more people passing by, even if the murderer left shoe prints or tire tracks, it would be difficult to identify them clearly.”

Tan Jia nodded, then looked at the various odds and ends in the alley, trying to find any clues such as shoe prints left by the murderer.

At this moment, the nearest police officers arrived, set up a cordon, and stopped those with ulterior motives and the surrounding residents who were watching the commotion.

Xiao Chen and Tan Ming, who arrived a little later, "smuggled" Lao Li into the cordon.

"Here we go again?" Xiao Chen asked in a low voice.

It's about a dream.

She nodded, still covering her nose.

The smell of garbage rotting and decaying together is really awful, so awful it makes you want to vomit.

Old Li, however, was used to it. Wearing a mask, he squatted next to the corpse and conducted a simple autopsy.

"There is a wound on his forehead, which looks like he was hit hard with some kind of long wooden stick. There are still some debris left in the wound. We'll take it back for a checkup later."

"But the cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation. The murderer pressed down on the lower half of the victim's face with his thumb and forefinger facing upwards, and with great force, leaving bruises on the face. It is clear that he was very emotional at the time."

Zheng Yan analyzed: "After the murderer hit the victim with a tool, he released her and then smothered her with his hands. Was it because the tool was not handy? Or did the victim scream loudly at the time, and the murderer changed his method on the spot?"

Xiao Chen immediately said, "I'll take some people to conduct a preliminary interview with the surrounding residents and ask if anyone heard any noise at the time."

Zheng Yan nodded and then called Tan Ming over: "Have you found out the deceased's identity?"

"We just found out. Someone recognized the deceased. They said her name was Yang Jia and she was a shop assistant at the Versatile Shoes store on the clothing street behind this alley."

(End of this chapter)