In an old apartment building, seven people looked through their windows and saw the same murder scene. The victim was Yu Deshui, a loan-sharking kingpin, found dead on the sofa in his own home with a knife buried in his chest.
A man’s body was discovered in the elevator of Dongze City’s landmark, Times Tower. The victim was Zhou Muzhi, a well-known entrepreneur. He had been stabbed seven times, and his body was left in a gruesome state.
The strange part was that the elevator surveillance footage showed Zhou Muzhi entering the elevator alone at 5:23 p.m. that afternoon and pressing the button for the thirteenth floor. The doors closed. At 5:24, the elevator reached the thirteenth floor and the doors opened, revealing Zhou Muzhi already lying in a pool of blood.
Just one minute. The elevator never stopped, and no one else got in or out. It was a perfect locked-room mystery.
Detective Chen Xiao took over the case. He reviewed the surveillance footage from the entire building and discovered that in the five minutes before and after Zhou Muzhi entered the elevator, thirteen people had ridden it up or down. Chen Xiao tracked them all down one by one and asked them to recall what had happened inside the elevator during that minute.
Thirteen testimonies, all pointing to the same conclusion: Zhou Muzhi had been alone in the elevator.
But the forensic examination showed that the seven stab wounds on Zhou Muzhi’s body came from at least three different directions, making suicide impossible. The killer had been in the elevator. The killer was one of those thirteen people, and the other twelve were all lying.
Chen Xiao had to pry the hidden truth out of those thirteen witnesses. As he drew closer to the answer, he discovered that they all shared a secret: every one of them was connected to an unsolved case from five years ago.
