DARK WEB TRAIL
The room was barely five or six square meters. Aside from a single bed and a trash can, the floor was bare. Pink polka-dot curtains blocked the window. Marcus Shaw walked over and pulled them aside, discovering a row of books and newspapers arranged on the sill, sorted by size, stacked with meticulous precision.
He flipped through them casually. On top were a few joke books—well-worn, their plastic covers wrinkled from handling, yet the pages inside were clean, the corners never folded.
Beneath those lay a stash of detective novels, their covers even more battered. Colored lines marked passages throughout, and upon closer inspection, every marked passage described a method of murder. Some had been highlighted with emphatic double underlines.
Marcus Shaw drew a sharp breath.
Next to those were several sixteen-page magazines—the kind sold under the counter at roadside stalls, with lurid headlines screaming about sensational secrets. Inside were accounts of old major cases, accompanied by grisly, poorly printed photographs.
Beneath it all were legal newspapers and printed web articles, all related to killing, all heavily annotated.
Marcus Shaw asked the innkeeper for a cardboard box and packed everything away. He searched the room more carefully, plucking two hairs from the folded bedding, and reaching under the bed to pull out several boxes of electric sparklers and a few spinning "little bee" fireworks.
He also found a pair of strange-looking glasses—he couldn't imagine their purpose—and bagged them as evidence too.
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Leaving the small inn, Marcus Shaw drove to an internet café.
ID records showed that Vera Magnus frequented this place late at night.
Marcus Shaw presented his credentials at the front desk and asked the manager to pull up the usage records—specifically, which computers Vera Magnus had used.
The manager shrugged. "Won't do you any good. Every time a customer logs off, the system wipes itself clean. Factory reset. You won't find a thing."
"I'm well aware. But I also know that every machine downstairs runs on virtual disks, and per regulatory requirements, your central server has to retain web browsing logs for at least sixty days. Accessible right here at the front desk."
The manager turned to the girl working the counter. "Fine, fine, look it up. Go on, hurry."
The browsing records showed that Vera Magnus frequently used search engines and watched episodes of Legal Report day after day.
More notably, she repeatedly visited a website with an extraordinarily long, bizarre URL—one that couldn't be copied.
No choice but to do it the hard way. Marcus Shaw stepped behind the counter, opened a text editor, and typed the URL character by character. It took over six minutes. Over a thousand characters long.
He pasted the full URL into the browser. The loading circle spun and spun. The page refused to load.
He hit refresh. The result was worse—a red error symbol.
He refreshed several more times. Same result.
The counter girl leaned in, anxious to help. "Maybe you mistyped somewhere? Confused an O with a zero, or a zero with an O?"
Like a bucket of ice water over his head. Marcus Shaw squinted and compared the characters one by one, line by line. His vision blurred quickly. Letters doubled. His eyes skipped between lines.
It took over ten minutes of careful double-checking—even scrutinizing every dash and hyphen—before he pasted the URL again. The loading circle spun for half a minute. Still inaccessible.
Marcus Shaw slammed his fist on the marble countertop, drawing the manager over. The manager asked what was wrong, then called over two network technicians to take a look.
The two techs examined the URL, ran a few tests, and reached a conclusion: it was an encrypted address that required filtering and extraction. Without that step, nobody was getting in.
"Encrypted? What kind of website needs encryption?"
The one with the square jaw said, "Your average porn or gambling site doesn't bother with encryption this sophisticated. Looks like a dark web address to me."
Marcus Shaw's stomach dropped. After a long pause, he asked, "Can you two crack it?"
The one with glasses glanced at the manager and said, "Are you insulting us? What do you think we do for a living?"
It took over half an hour before the front desk showed signs of progress.
Marcus Shaw rushed over. In the text editor lay a short, clean URL with an unfamiliar suffix.
"We're in?"
The guy with glasses shook his head. "Not yet. Dark web sites are all illegal marketplaces. We wouldn't dare enter without you being present."
Marcus Shaw grabbed the mouse, pasted the URL into the browser, and pressed Enter. The loading circle began spinning again.
Everyone held their breath.
It spun for over thirty seconds. Marcus Shaw was about to question their competence when the page suddenly loaded.
There was almost no design to it. No logo. Just a white background with lines and lines of English text.
The counter girl said, "What, the dark web looks like this? Doesn't seem very dark. It's all bright and clean."
Square Jaw laughed, peeled a whistle candy from its wrapper, and popped it into her mouth.
The guy with glasses said, "Even if we're in, it's useless. It's all English. Can't read a word of it myself." He looked at Marcus Shaw.
Marcus Shaw said, "No wonder I found a translation website in her browsing history."
He scrolled to the bottom, copied a huge block of English text, and pasted it into the translation site to wait for results.
Professional hacking of gambling websites, bulk sale of e-commerce user data, insider trading of financial company secrets, purchasing photos of people holding their ID cards, trafficking twelve-year-old girls as sex slaves—nothing but evil, each line more horrifying than the last.
Seeing Marcus Shaw frown, the guy with glasses said, "Don't stress too much. Most of this stuff is overseas. You couldn't do anything about it even if you wanted to."
"Then how do I find out which posts my suspect accessed, and who she was communicating with?"
The counter girl was tickling Square Jaw. They giggled softly.
The guy with glasses said, "Patience. Now that we've accessed the website, we've established an IP connection. That gives me a target for extracting residual cookies and piecing together usage traces."
Marcus Shaw watched him work for a long while, screens flashing—black, white, blue, yellow—in patterns he couldn't follow, dizzying enough to make his eyes water. He stepped away, tossed fifty yuan on the counter, grabbed a few bottles of water from the fridge, opened one for himself, and distributed the rest.
He'd barely taken two sips when the guy with glasses announced, "Got it."
Marcus Shaw hurried over. A black terminal window displayed dense columns of white and red code. The tech used the mouse to select several lines and pointed. "Look here. You can see she regularly chatted with the user at ID sequence 428751. High frequency—at one point they were messaging every day, dozens of exchanges per day."
Marcus Shaw studied the screen for a long time, understanding none of it, though he pretended otherwise. Finally he asked, "Can you recover the chat logs?"
The guy with glasses smiled. "Brother, don't forget—this is the dark web. Finding evidence of the chats at all is already a minor miracle."
Marcus Shaw said quickly, "Absolutely, absolutely. I can see that. You two, your skills are top-notch. Please, try a little harder for me. Just a little more."
At that, Square Jaw stopped teasing the counter girl and pushed forward. "With his half-assed skills? Let me show you what real technique looks like." He winked at the girl, snatched the mouse, and began hammering the keyboard.
A few minutes later, he dropped the mouse. "There. Can't recover the actual conversation, but I pieced together the message types. On June twelfth at 21:47, she sent the other party two links. Don't know what they linked to, but they were domestic URLs. At 22:01, the other party replied with a JPG image—small file, 249 kilobytes, 605 by 605 pixels. A perfect square."
Marcus Shaw's eyes narrowed in thought.
The guy with glasses chimed in: "My guess? A QR code."
Marcus Shaw's heart skipped.
Over the next hour, the two techs helped Marcus Shaw discover that "428751" had also sent Vera Magnus several HTML files.
"What could those be?" Marcus Shaw asked.
Square Jaw said, "Hypertext. Simply put, a saved web page."
"Why go to the trouble? Why not just send a link?"
Square Jaw shrugged.
The guy with glasses said, "If it's not a web page, it could be a report of some kind. Some highly specialized sites generate reports in this format."
A report. Marcus Shaw folded his arms, deep in thought. Various keywords flashed through his mind and crystallized into four: plagiarism detection.
He gathered the evidence and then asked, "Is there any way to contact this person? Have a conversation with them?"
"You'd need an invite code to register on this dark web. Hard to get one on short notice. Besides, I'm guessing the other party is a serious hacker. You're tracking this woman, so she must have paid them for services. Look here—these are cryptocurrency transaction records. Even if you managed to speak with them, they have a code of conduct. They won't reveal anything. And they're completely untraceable. They could be in the building upstairs, or on the other side of the planet."
Marcus Shaw reflected that you truly couldn't judge a book by its cover. Who would have imagined that a seemingly rough, uneducated rural woman was, behind the scenes, navigating the digital underworld with such savvy—doing deals with hackers on the dark web?
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The next day, Marcus Shaw traveled to Millbrook.
As he was leaving, he ran into Lucas Lutz in the corridor.
The young man wore civilian clothes and carried a cardboard box. Seeing Marcus Shaw, he stopped, bowed formally, said thank you, and continued on his way. Marcus Shaw stood frozen, watching as Dr. Maren Frost came running down the stairs to chase after him.
After a moment's thought, Marcus Shaw decided to let them go. He headed for the train station.
Arriving in Millbrook, Marcus Shaw had to ask around extensively before locating the village where the Shan brothers had lived. Most people said they didn't know them. Eventually an old man told him, "You mean the two who went to the provincial capital to make money and both lost their lives? They're buried behind the western hill."
"Do they have any relatives still here?"
"Not a one. The young folks in the village don't even know who they were."
Since he'd made the trip, Marcus Shaw followed the old man to the hill behind the village and found the brothers' graves.
Two small earthen mounds, side by side. No headstones—just two boards stuck into the ground, each bearing a name written in black marker: Shane, Sean.
Weeds grew thick around the graves, but the grass directly beside them had been carefully cleared. Rotten steamed buns and shriveled apples lay before each mound. A row of spent sparklers had been planted in the earth. Two joke books with garish covers, sun-bleached and curled at the edges, were weighted down with stones.
Marcus Shaw took out his phone and photographed the graves.
The old man said, "No bodies inside. We know that. It's not the custom anymore. What's buried here is two urns."
Marcus Shaw nodded, then crouched down and flipped through one of the joke books.
"What you don't know is there was a fat woman who used to come here all the time. Didn't look like she was from around here—nobody knew which village. She never spoke to anyone, no matter how much they asked. She'd just sit down in front of the graves, open a book, and start reading aloud, talking and laughing to herself. She'd sit there all afternoon. Nobody dared go near her—afraid she was crazy, might scratch or bite you."
"She came often?"
The old man wiped his face with the dirty towel around his neck. "Oh yes. For months, almost every week. Later we stopped paying attention. She never started fires or caused trouble. Kept to herself. We just let her be."
"Has she come recently?"
"Come to think of it, she hasn't shown up in almost three weeks. Something must have happened to her."