Chronicles of Urban Mysteries

On the third day of the Lunar New Year in 2000, while all of Beian City was immersed in the festive spirit of Spring Festival, a headless female corpse was rotting inside a bed frame at the Jinyue Hotel in Hongshan District. When Liu Feixia, chief of the criminal investigation squad, received the report, the TV was replaying a Spring Festival Gala skit. A forensic expert’s icy voice crackled over his radio: “Female, around eighteen years old. Dismembered after death. Head missing.”

This was a race against time to catch a killer. A stolen identity card, a tampered crime scene, leads that had gone cold for the holiday, and rapidly mounting public pressure formed an invisible net around the task force. The case ground to a halt when DNA tests on more than twenty missing people across the city all came back negative. Then, in a neon-lit foot massage parlor, Liu Feixia heard a trembling girl called “Xiaoya” say, “Lulu had a butterfly on her left shoulder...”

The pursuit stretched two thousand kilometers, from Beian to Qinghai. Liu Feixia had to contend not only with altitude sickness and bitter winds, but also with a twisted soul: Sun, a twenty-six-year-old killer who both depended on and hated women. When they finally found the head in a cave, wrapped in a hotel bath towel, Liu Feixia lit more than a cigarette. He was also paying tribute to the short life of an eighteen-year-old girl.