Late at night, the police radio channel carried nothing but the crackle of static.
Lin Feng stubbed out his seventh cigarette. Its crimson glow flickered in the corridor outside the autopsy room. This was the third “smiling corpse” case this month. The bundle of dry straw in the victim’s chest cavity gleamed an ominous gold beneath the surgical lights.
“The surveillance cameras are all blind, the motive is a mystery, and this is the only physical evidence,” he said into his earpiece, his voice dry.
Su Jiu’s fingers clattered across a keyboard on the other end. “Chief, the folklore database says straw effigies are an ancient form of witchcraft in the mountains of the southwest. But there’s something else mixed in. I dug up a nursery rhyme deep in the dark web. Twenty years ago, seven children...”
Her voice cut off abruptly.
The autopsy room door slid open without a sound. Bai Ye leaned against the doorframe, a piece of straw stuck to his fingertip. His pale face looked almost transparent in the cold light, yet the depths of his eyes reflected a bizarre vision of a wheat field.
“Lin Feng,” he said, his voice sounding as if it came from far across the water. “The last thing the victim ‘saw’ was seven children holding hands and dancing in a circle as they sang a song.”
He paused, then softly hummed a tune.
Lin Feng’s phone buzzed. A new photo from the evidence unit appeared on the screen. Deep inside the bundle of straw was a rusty child’s badge, engraved with a faint “1996.”
“Summer 1996,” Su Jiu’s voice came back on, trembling with uncharacteristic fear. “Seven children disappeared from the orphanage west of the city. The records say... none survived.”
Bai Ye looked up at the empty corridor behind Lin Feng.
“But now,” he said, “something has come back.”
