Lu Zhiwei’s scalpel cuts into more than corpses: it opens a wound that has festered for twenty years. At a murder scene on a rainy night, she plucks a metal fragment from beneath the victim’s fingernails. It is identical to the “butterfly bone” wound found at the scene of her mother’s murder. The serial killer known as the Taxidermist closes in, leaving broken-winged butterflies and eerie nursery rhymes in their wake. Every murder reenacts a childhood memory she buried deep. The sharp edge of criminal investigation team captain Gu Chen meets her cool composure. They go from clashing to hunting the killer side by side, but just as they near the truth, they run into resistance from the police leadership. When the killer places her mother’s keepsake in front of her and smiles, saying, “It’s time to finish the final specimen,” Lu Zhiwei finally understands: the testimony hidden in the gaps between bones has been waiting for her to cut it open herself all along, including the past she has never dared to face.
