Three days after the floodwaters receded, a skeleton washed out of the aqueduct.
The forensic examiner said: male, around forty, dead for at least five years.
But among the household registers for the town’s more than three hundred residents, not a single person had ever been reported "missing."
Without a missing person, there could be no killer.
I set the urn of ashes at the village entrance and went door to door asking questions. The old women shook their heads, the men smoked in silence, and the adults dragged the children back inside.
Only a madwoman peering through a crack in the wall made a shushing gesture at me. "You city people won't figure it out."
Three hundred and twenty-seven mouths in the village, and three hundred and twenty-six of them told no truth.
Then I opened the water records, ruined by the flood. The handwriting on the last page was exactly like that of the station chief who had "committed suicide" five years ago.
He had written: I didn't kill him, but I didn't tell the truth.
My name is Zhao Ergou. This time, I'll pry open the whole town's mouths first.
