That Year the Rain Fell Silently

Heavy rain washes away sin, and rust seals the truth. On the summer night of 1979, Wang Xiujuan, a female worker at Linjiang Textile Factory, was found dead in a back alley. Her neck was bruised and her lower body was naked except for a pair of brand new red plastic sandals. This ritualistic murder marked the beginning of a decade of terror that had gripped small southern towns - educated youths who had returned to the city, primary school teachers, and department store clerks were murdered one after another, and their bodies were either stuffed into factory-printed cotton or covered with hard-hit editorial newspapers. The murderer "Raincoat Man" is like a ghost, always pushing his bicycle and disappearing into the streets on rainy nights. Veteran detective Chen Guodong has personally experienced the storm of severe crackdowns: his apprentice Zhou Zhiming was paralyzed and died, and the suspect Zhao Weidong was unjustly executed. The clues to the real culprit pointed to the security section chief Sun Jianjun, but he mysteriously fell from the building at the factory celebration banquet on the eve of the arrest. The only insider suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and all physical evidence was destroyed along with the restructuring of the state-owned enterprise. In 2001, a skeleton clutching a rusty work sign was salvaged from the Three Gorges Reservoir area. DNA testing showed that the owner of the skeleton was actually a blood relative of the "Raincoat Man"! Retired Chen Guodong rushed to the demolition ruins and saw a figure in a raincoat pushing a bicycle in the heavy rain. When he screamed and chased after him, he fell into the ditch - the red shoe buckle with blood on his palm rolled into the sewer, and the sirens of the new city in the distance pierced the rain curtain... A pursuit that spanned reform was eventually swallowed up by the mud of the times.