Black Snow, Frozen Earth

The snow in Jiamusi in 1988 fell deep enough to bury half a doorway. Blood from the electrical motor factory’s residential building trickled down the gaps between the stairs, freezing into dark-red icicles in the twenty-eight-below-zero cold. Wang Li lay beside her sewing machine. Twelve stab wounds made her look like cotton torn apart by a wild animal, and her right hand clutched half a length of red yarn.

The only witness was her ten-year-old adopted son, Li Xiaojun. He huddled in a wardrobe, covered in blood, his eyes colder than ice.

Her ex-husband, Wang Tiejun, became the prime suspect. The crescent-shaped scar on his arm was still stained with Wang Li’s blood. But Zhao Weidong stared at the blood spatter pattern on the wall in confusion: the regular patch of blank space looked as if something had blocked it.

Over the next ten years, women were stabbed twelve times and killed in one place after another: a textile factory restroom, a hospital duty room, a yarn shop... When Sun Xiaomei found antifreeze in the soap, she suddenly remembered that Li Xiaojun’s file said he was “allergic to antifreeze.”

Then, during a standoff at a refrigerated warehouse, the “child” suddenly pulled off his sweater, revealing a red-string bracelet identical to the victim’s. He smiled, dimples showing, but his voice sounded like sandpaper scraping frozen earth. “I waited ten years to find someone willing to adopt me.”