Xiaotao and I returned to the dormitory to examine Lin Xiaolan's body.
Because she went to see her agent at night, Lin Xiaolan was dressed in brightly-colored clothes. Looking down at the blood-covered floor and the expressionless corpse, I felt the loss of a beauty.
After putting on rubber gloves, I conducted the autopsy. The time of death was less than half an hour ago and the cause of death was skull fracture and massive hemorrhage. Judging from the blood on the ground, she must have had severe spasms before she died.
Next to the body was a slightly damaged concrete table stained with blood and bits of flesh.
I checked Lin Xiaolan's hair roots and found signs of hair follicle shedding. Obviously, the murderer pulled her hair from behind and smashed her head against the concrete table.
Additionally, I noticed her cheeks were red and swollen as if she had been slapped hard. The blow was so heavy that the corners of her mouth were bleeding. In one eye, the cornea was ripped off so her entire eye was bright red. There was bleeding inside the mouth and the faint odor of urine.
She had bruises on both knees, and when I turned the body over, I found a clear shoe print on her back. Xiaotao immediately snapped a picture with her cell phone, though the footprint was unlikely to be of any use.
It seemed like the murderer kicked her in the back, forcing her to kneel on the ground.
"Song Yang, there is something on the floor!" Xiaotao pointed out.
I looked up and noticed a mineral water bottle filled with yellowish liquid in the corner. Upon unscrewing the lid, the foul odor of urine assaulted my nose.
"This time the Imitator seemed very agitated,” I analyzed. “He forced Lin Xiaolan to drink urine, slapped her in the face, then slammed her head against the concrete table, basically torturing her to death."
"A repeat of the bullying?!" Xiaotao frowned.
I went on to examine other parts of the body, though the strange thing was, I found no other scars. If the Imitator was lashing out at Lin Xiaolan, wouldn’t she have received more injuries? Yet there was no such thing.
There was another suspicious element–Lin Xiaolan was forced under duress but I found no laceration marks on the body. Did she come here willingly?
"I’ll take back what I just said. The Imitator was perfectly calm this time," I surmised.
"You call this sort of torture calm?" Xiaotao arched an eyebrow.
I looked up and my gaze fell upon two double-sided adhesive tapes on the ceramic tile of the innermost wall with some dust stuck on it. I motioned for Xiaotao to come take a look while measuring the size and position with my hands. "I think it was a cell phone!" I remarked.
"The Imitator was carrying out someone else’s orders. He fixed his cell phone here so his employer could ‘appreciate’ Lin Xiaolan's torture. And the Imitator himself was as calm as a machine."
"But torture Lin Xiaolan? Was she also one of the bullies?" Xiaotao asked.
I shook my head, "The three bullies were murdered and had their families implicated, but Lin Xiaolan is an exception. It seems that the murderer feels differently about her. When Lin Xiaolan claimed she had been bullied, she was obviously lying. I read interviews about her, and she won everyone’s sympathy by playing a victim of school bullying on one of the programs!"
"So the bullying didn’t happen to Lin Xiaolan but someone else!” Xiaotao exclaimed. “Lin Xiaolan was a bystander who pretended to have personally experienced the bullying, and used these ‘experiences’ to gain her position, thus becoming a well-known author."
"The murderer seems to hate her more than the others for deceiving the world. So she was killed in this manner to give her the taste of being bullied," I concluded.
When I turned to leave, Xiaotao interjected, "Aren’t you going to examine the footprint?"
"He won't leave his real footprints,” I explained. “Besides, I don’t have my Autopsy Umbrella with me!"
The technical team would have to sweep the crime scene and collect evidence so I refrained from burning joss papers and waited till I returned to the station.
The officers managed to find a witness–a passer-by who stated he had seen a car parked nearby from which a man and a beautiful woman alighted and entered the school. He assumed it was a couple on a date and didn't pay much attention.
"What did the man look like?" questioned Xiaotao.
The witness tried jogging his memory but all he said was, "He had a very ordinary face. So ordinary that I can't remember anything."
He wasn’t the only one who suffered the same affliction; I too had trouble recalling the Imitator’s face despite the fact that the man had actually spoken to me face to face earlier. He was so unremarkable you would forget his face as soon as you looked away.
"Were they walking side by side?" I asked.
"Yes!" said the witness.
"What about the car?" Xiaotao added.
The witness shook his head, "I didn't notice that."
The Imitator probably drove away while disguised as a policeman. Xiaotao sent officers to check for nearby traffic surveillance cameras and found one at both ends of the street. Not surprisingly, the Imitator parked right in the blind spot between the two cameras.
We managed to obtain the license plate after the technical team restored the image but it was found to be a fake.
The Imitator was just like a ghost, managing to creep around the blind spots in the surveillance cameras all over the city, coming and going without a trace. Even I was impressed!
On the way back, I perused some of Lin Xiaolan’s works.
"Why are you still reading her novels?" Xiaotao wondered out loud.
"I'm checking the publication dates!"
After the award-winning novel about school bullying was first published, she wrote a few other novels on the same subject, but none of them came close to the first. Later, Lin Xiaolan wrote another novel which basically had the same theme titled, "The Desolate Age Of Seventeen."
In my opinion, Lin Xiaolan wasn’t intentional at first and never expected her novel to gain acclaim. Due to various considerations such as marketing purposes, popularity and image, she assumed the experience that happened to someone else and portrayed herself as a tragic heroine.
In the beginning, she never intended to lead the world astray. Influenced by different factors, she allowed the lies to grow to this day and became a fraud in the eyes of the murderer!
Perhaps she didn't realize how much harm she caused the murderer. So when the Imitator offered for her to meet the murderer, she agreed immediately. She might have even held onto the naive idea of "talking it out.”
When she arrived at their old school, all she saw was a cell phone before the Imitator unleashed violence upon her. And the person whose painful past was wantonly stolen by her looked on coldly.
I sighed, "When someone tells a lie, they have to continue lying to keep up the pretense. At the end of the day, they can no longer tell what’s true and what’s false!"
As we passed through the downtown area, I looked out of the window and realized that anyone could be the Imitator. How could we find him so easily?
"We’ve reached yet another dead end,” Xiaotao huffed. “And this time, the murderer has killed all the people on the supposed revenge list. We don't even know who he is. Looks like this case..."
"No, we still have another clue!” I corrected her. “The murderer might not even be aware of this clue. Let’s take a gamble!"