Chapter 31: Su Ya's Chilling Profile

By the time both teams had finished cross-referencing their files, they had compiled a list of six suspicious deaths — suicides and apparent accidents — spanning from the third of the previous month to the present day.

The first deceased was a twenty-six-year-old woman. She had not worked since graduation, had failed the civil service examination four consecutive times, and had been living on her parents' support while the weight of each failure pressed down harder than the last. Her parents reported that she had been showing signs of suicidal ideation for some time. She had died by jumping from a building.

The second deceased was a twenty-nine-year-old male salesman. He was approaching thirty with nothing to show for the years — no advancement, no clear future, no sense of where the path was supposed to go from here. He had gone on blind dates under sustained family pressure, and the combined reality of no house, no car, and a salary that couldn't compete had done particular damage to whatever hope he had been carrying. He had told both his parents and his colleagues, more than once, that he felt he couldn't go on living like this. His death had been classified as an accidental traffic incident — struck by a Ferrari. His parents had received one point two million in compensation.

The third deceased was a twenty-four-year-old male journalist. He had spent his working life pressing his face against the glass of industries full of corruption and darkness, and had found himself powerless to do anything about what he saw there. He had developed severe depression. He died by turning on the gas and succumbing to poisoning.

The fourth deceased was a seventeen-year-old girl, a high school student. She had been unhappy with her appearance for a long time, and her classmates had made sure she remained unhappy — the specific, relentless cruelty that certain people in certain schools apply to whatever they identify as different or vulnerable. She had undergone plastic surgery, and the surgery had failed, which had not helped. After that she had been afraid to see people, had developed a temper that frightened and confused those around her, and had cried to her parents repeatedly that she didn't want to be alive anymore. She had died by cutting her wrists while soaking in the bathtub.

The fifth and sixth cases were the recent electrocution death at the swimming pool and the female graduate student who had been found hanged in the activity room.

What these six people shared, aside from the fact that they were dead, was a single absence: all six of their mobile phones were missing. Those phones had almost certainly been the instruments through which each victim had communicated with whoever had helped them die.

Beyond the high school student and the graduate student — who had been tutor and pupil — none of the six had any connection to each other. When the third team had originally investigated the high school girl's case, they had checked the tutor's background as a matter of standard procedure. The parents had said their daughter and her tutor were close, confiding in each other, that they had hoped the relationship would help their daughter process the trauma of the failed surgery. The graduate student, at the time of the incident, had been in class with a solid alibi. The case had been closed.

This time, with both teams working together, investigators retrieved the surveillance footage from the areas surrounding the first four crime scenes and went through it carefully. What they found was consistent across all four locations: figures that matched the profile seen in the footage from the polytechnic university — oversized coats that concealed body shape, hats pulled low enough to cover the cheekbones, black gloves. The combination was so ordinary in winter that it had slid past the original investigators multiple times without triggering anything. The cold made everyone dress like that. There was nothing to see.

Except that now, looking at all four sets of footage side by side, there was clearly something to see.

This confirmed that the operation was indeed a group. Multiple people, coordinated, working together across different cases and different scenes.

The footage also showed that the number of people present at any given scene varied — usually two or three — but analysis of height and gait suggested a consistent core of approximately four individuals. Gender could not be determined from the footage. Whether additional members existed who had not yet been deployed was an open question.

Yan Han, looking at this picture, said: "The planning team — I mean the people who have no suicidal ideation of their own and exist solely to facilitate the deaths of others — are all male."

Zhen Nuan looked at him sideways. She genuinely could not follow the reasoning from where she was standing. "Why?"

"The swimming pool case exposed the group's constraint."

"What constraint?"

Su Ya understood before he had finished speaking and completed the thought for him: "When the operation at the swimming pool needed to happen, they used the next scheduled suicide victim — a female graduate student — as the person present at the scene. Because it is physically very difficult for a woman to hold a grown man underwater and drown him against his will. A female witness at the scene therefore carries dramatically less suspicion."

She let this sit for a moment, then looked at Hei Zi with a specific quality of attention.

Hei Zi took a second to arrive at what was being communicated. Then he rubbed the back of his head with the expression of someone confronting their own blind spot from an uncomfortable angle. "Right. If the witness had been male, I would have detained him. I would have stalled him regardless of anything he said, and kept him there until the autopsy results came back."

"Yes," Su Ya said. "And this is another illustration of the trap of habitual thinking. When a death appears to require physical force and the victim is male, the natural intuition is to look for a male perpetrator. A woman present at the scene is almost automatically moved down the list of suspects."

Zhen Nuan followed this through to its conclusion: "Which means that sending a woman to the scene to facilitate the death serves a specific operational purpose — it substantially reduces the risk of immediate apprehension."

The calculation was clear: the graduate student dying the following day would inevitably draw police attention and raise questions. But possible questions afterward was a far better outcome than certain apprehension at the swimming pool. Even if suspicion materialized later, connecting the graduate student to the swimming pool required establishing a link between two people with no apparent relationship — and the person who had actually organized the operation would be nowhere near the scene, completely insulated.

If there had been a woman among the group's core members, the problem would have been solvable differently — a female accomplice could have been present at the swimming pool without requiring the use of a future victim. The fact that they hadn't done it that way confirmed the absence. There were no women in this group. They had assessed their options and used the most expedient solution available: put the next victim to work before her own death.

"Correct. This is an all-male operation."

At this point the trace evidence team's results arrived, and they carried three findings of significant weight.

The first: fibers not belonging to the graduate student's clothing had been found on the rope from which she had hanged. A second fiber, not belonging to the drowning victim, had been found on the cover of the swimming pool's electrical box. Both fibers were of extremely similar composition — both originating from gloves produced by the same high-end outdoor equipment brand.

The second: the fibers recovered from the flowerpot used to strike Zhen Nuan, and the fibers Yan Han had deliberately torn from the motorcyclist's glove during the pursuit, were also from the same high-end outdoor brand.

The third: the fibers from the serial suicide cases and the fibers from the attempts on Zhen Nuan's life came from the same manufacturer. From the same company. The same product line.

Before this, the picture had been built from experience and inference — the structure of reasoning that investigators used when the physical evidence was thin. Now it was something different. Now there was a chain of material fact connecting the serial facilitated suicides to the attempts on Zhen Nuan's life, connecting both to a single group of people who bought their gloves from the same place.

Guan Xiaoyu said, with the controlled outrage of someone who has processed the implications clearly: "These people are extraordinarily reckless. They attacked a police officer. They attacked the police."

Su Ya smiled slightly — not with warmth exactly, but with the particular quality of someone who finds the question both answerable and somewhat illuminating about the people asking it. "They did, yes. Because they don't have a clear relationship with the concept of police as a category. The law, the state, consequences — these things exist at a distance from how they actually experience the world and their place in it."

This drew attention from every officer in the room. What she said next held that attention entirely.

"The group we are looking for consists of individuals between approximately seventeen and twenty-three years of age. School dropouts or otherwise disengaged from conventional pathways. No stable employment. From relatively comfortable and materially stable family backgrounds, with no significant childhood trauma. They almost certainly live in Shangnan District — the area that has become a hub for a certain tier of young wealth in Yucheng. Their activities include extreme sports and parkour. They don't have stable romantic relationships. They frequent nightclubs with some regularity and spend money freely without particular concern for where it goes."

She continued without pause: "There have been a number of recent complaints and minor incidents in the area — noise violations, street racing in the city center. The individuals in question have developed a sudden, comparatively recent interest in detective fiction and investigative procedurals, and have been consuming both in significant volume."

She let the profile settle before delivering the practical conclusion: "I believe that a search concentrated in Shangnan District — specifically the bar district on the back streets and the 367 area and its associated extreme sports circles — combined with a review of recent incident reports and complaints filed with the district public security bureau and the local precinct, should be sufficient to identify them."

Everyone in the room was familiar with Su Ya's reputation as a criminal profiler. Knowing something intellectually and watching it operate in real time, however, produced two entirely different experiences. The room absorbed the specificity of what she had just produced with a silence that was closer to reverence than ordinary quiet.

Brother Tan nodded with the pragmatic agreement of someone checking what he has already observed against a framework that confirms it. "The comfortable family background tracks — their parkour gear at 367 that day was high-end, the kind that costs real money. The car with the fake plates that rammed Zhen Nuan was a lower-end BMW, but they're young, probably bought by the family. And then there's the motorcycle — that wasn't cheap either."

The movements they had displayed during the parkour chase had been trained, deliberate, practiced. Not the movements of enthusiastic amateurs.

"We should be able to find them relatively quickly," someone said.

"Faster than that," Yan Han said, a slight tension arriving in his brow. "How are they locating the people who want to die? Find that mechanism, and we find them faster."

"And we must find them fast." Su Ya's tone had shifted slightly, carrying something more deliberate now. "Because they've already started to change."

"Change how?"

"They're escalating. The attempts on Zhen Nuan mark the beginning of a transition. Up until now, their entire investment of energy and creativity went into the design of each facilitated death — treating every case as its own project, its own puzzle. But the police have found the pattern. They know we're looking. And people like this don't respond to increased attention by going quiet. They respond by changing the game."

"You mean they'll stop facilitating suicides?"

"Not immediately. But the sequence will shift. The next stage won't be disguising homicide as suicide — it will be the reverse. They'll design what were previously facilitated suicides so that they look like obvious murders. They're still killing people who want to die, but they'll stop pretending otherwise. They'll step out from behind the curtain and begin to directly challenge the police." Her voice dropped slightly. "And if we haven't caught them by the time that phase runs its course — if they move through it and come out the other side — then the constraint falls away entirely. They won't limit themselves to willing participants anymore. It becomes something we'd recognize as straightforward murder."

The meeting room processed this in silence.

Yan Han set his paper cup down with a quietness that communicated something more like certainty than calm. "It won't reach that stage. We'll have them before then."

He looked around the room. "Su Yang — take investigators to Shangnan District following Su Ya's profile. Hei Zi — work with the third team, keep hunting the phones, pull the traffic camera analysis, map their movement patterns. Brother Tan — go back through the full material and find how they're identifying their subjects. How they're being found by people who want to die."

"Yes!" The room responded and dispersed.

As the group moved, Lao Bai drifted toward Su Yang and said under his breath, with the tone of someone recalibrating an earlier assumption: "Finding them shouldn't be hard. That day at 367 — the way they moved, the way they climbed — I actually thought for a minute we were dealing with trained professionals. Scaling walls like they were born on them."

Yan Han, crossing the room, caught this. "Didn't I say so at the time? They ran instead of engaging. That was because engaging would have gone badly for them."

Brother Tan and Lao Bai exchanged a look in which a great deal of unspoken communication occurred.

Zhen Nuan, processing this with the slightly unfocused expression she wore when she was doing honest arithmetic on something: "We all thought you were joking when you said that."

Yan Han looked at her steadily. The look continued for several seconds.

She looked back with the expression of someone who has said a true thing and genuinely does not understand why it is causing a problem.

He redirected his gaze to Lao Bai and Brother Tan with the particular quality of attention that communicated, without any words, a complete and unflattering assessment of everyone involved in the last thirty seconds.

Lao Bai covered his face with one hand. "Little Cat," he said, "why would you say the true thing out loud."