Murder and Manslaughter

What Fei Qiang told them on the mountain was this:

Jia Shi had not been killed by the person who killed the others. Jia Shi had faked his own death.

Two months before he disappeared, Jia Shi had come to Fei Qiang — still a police officer at the time — with a private request: help him fake a convincing death and walk away. He was terrified. He had received the death list and understood, before the others did, exactly what it meant and exactly who had made it. He had pieced together enough of the story to know that escaping to another city wasn't going to work. The killer knew things about all of them that no stranger could know. The only way to stop being a target was to stop existing.

Fei Qiang had refused at first. It was illegal, and it implicated him in an active murder investigation. But Jia Shi had leverage: he knew about the vice raids, about which officers were on which payrolls. He didn't threaten — he simply laid out the situation with the exhausted clarity of a man with nothing to lose.

So Fei Qiang had helped. He arranged a body — a John Doe from the morgue, unidentified, approximate build — and a crime scene that the investigation would accept. He had resigned from the force before the case progressed far enough that his involvement would surface.

But Jia Shi had made a mistake. He had hidden on White Stone Mountain, living in a maintenance outbuilding at the graveyard, surviving on supplies brought in at night. He had gotten complacent and begun accepting deliveries under his original name from an online store — force of habit, or stupidity, or both. The killer had a contact inside the delivery network. The package that arrived with "Jia Shi" on the sender line had blown everything.

Zhai Jia, who received it by accident, had already been under enormous psychological pressure for weeks. When she went to the mountain and found him alive in a coffin — he had been sleeping, had simply woken up at her approach — her mind had snapped completely around the experience. She had processed it as a supernatural encounter and never recovered. In her fractured state she had begun to act out the role she believed she was already cast in: a dead woman walking.

The police had shot her and called it a justified shooting. It was not. She was in psychotic crisis and was holding her own bead bracelet, not a weapon. But the officer who shot her had believed — had been told by someone in authority — that she was armed. The investigation into the shooting was handled internally and closed within a week.

Fei Qiang paused here. Zhu Hua had her hand over her mouth. Hui Nan's face was very still.

"And the fifth pockmark?" Hui Nan asked.

"A man named Xu Sheng," Fei Qiang said. "Buried up here about eight months ago. He was the last of the five. The original five."

"Zhai Jia said she killed him."

"Yes. She did." He looked at Hui Nan. "That's what broke her. She killed him to protect herself — she thought he was going to come after her next — and then the police covered it up as another animal death in a rural area. And she carried it alone. For eight months."

Hui Nan was quiet.

"The person who made the death list," she said. "You know who it is."

"Yes," Fei Qiang said.

"Then tell me."

He told them.