Under the Skin

When Shen Yi was young, he painted a picture he never should have painted. As he put brush to canvas, he never imagined that three days later someone would fall from the seventeenth floor and smash into the concrete, their skull shattered into eight pieces, blood spreading through the gaps between the tiles like the brightest vermilion on his palette.

He never touched a paintbrush again until he joined the criminal investigation unit, trading charcoal for a sketching pencil. Before the autopsy table, surrounded by opened flesh and broken bones, he drew the final faces of victims whose throats had been cut, who had been strangled, or whose faces had been smashed by blunt instruments.

His partner, Du Cheng, initially doubted that someone who painted could solve crimes. Later, the two of them crouched in the rain beside a bloated, decomposing body with no name. As maggots crawled out of its eye sockets, Shen Yi said the man's mother was still waiting for him to come home for dinner. For the first time, Du Cheng turned away without a word.

They went from testing each other to standing shoulder to shoulder, piecing together the same shadow from bodies that had been dismembered, burned, or sunk underwater until they swelled. The more Shen Yi drew, the more he realized that the subject of the picture he had painted all those years ago stood at the end of these cases, taking lives one after another.

Every time he drew a killer's face, it was as if he were making another copy of the evidence of his own past crime. The pencil's scratching against the paper was as faint as a cut through skin. As the lines came together, he could no longer tell whether he was drawing the dead to rest or digging his own grave.