The Neighbors (Part 1)
I've been on the force long enough to lose my illusions about humanity. These days, I treat every case with the wariness of a man walking through a minefield.
Still, nothing could have prepared me for what I found in that apartment building.
It was June. The heat had settled over the city like a wet blanket, and the residents of Riverside Gardens were already cranky about the water situation. The building's water tanks on the roof had been acting up for weeks—low pressure, intermittent service, that rusty taste that clung to the back of your throat no matter how many times you let the tap run.
On June 6th, the water pressure dropped to almost nothing. Complaints flooded in. The property management sent a maintenance worker up to the roof to check the tanks, and that's when they found her.
A woman, floating face-down in the water tank. Bloated. Discolored. The stench hit you before you even got close.
I won the lottery—well, sort of. I was the one dispatched to handle the call. My partner Hal and I arrived to find a scene that would give anyone nightmares. The building superintendent, a gaunt middle-aged woman, was shaking so badly she could barely hold her phone. Her eyes bulged with terror, and it took Officer Yang and me five minutes just to get her to stop screaming.
The body was a woman, floating face-down in the murky water of the rooftop tank. Decomposition had set in—the skin was peeling, discolored, bloated beyond recognition. The smell was indescribable, a thick, cloying stench that clung to your nostrils and refused to leave.
I ordered the body removed and transported for autopsy.
The coroner's preliminary report confirmed the victim was female, approximately nineteen years old, with no visible external injuries. The cause of death was inconclusive due to decomposition, but initial findings suggested she'd been alive when she entered the water tank—small scratches and abrasions on her fingers and the inner surface of the tank suggested she'd tried to claw her way out.
Someone had locked her in and left her to drown.
The building itself was a typical Riverside Gardens setup—sixteen floors, an elevator that opened directly into each unit, the kind of place that attracted young professionals and small families. The kind of place where you assumed you were safe.
I was wrong.
---
We identified the victim quickly: a nineteen-year-old named Hannah Xue, a local college student who'd been renting a room in Apartment 7A on the seventh floor. The unit was registered to a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Grandma Yu, who'd been running an informal rooming house for years, renting out rooms to young women at below-market rates.
According to Grandma Yu, Hannah had moved in about six months ago and rarely caused any trouble. She was quiet, studious, and always paid her rent on time.
So who would want to kill a quiet, hardworking college student?
I interviewed everyone on the seventh floor and in the building. The other tenants described Hannah as "nice but shy," "always studying," and "never any trouble." No one had seen her argue with anyone or mention any problems.
But when I dug deeper, a different picture emerged.
Hannah had been born in a small town two hundred kilometers away. Her family was poor—father worked construction, mother stayed home with younger siblings. Hannah had been a good student, one of the lucky ones who'd made it to college on a combination of scholarships and part-time jobs.
She'd moved to the city for school, found an ad for Grandma Yu's rooming house, and never looked back. The rent was cheap and the location convenient. She kept her head down and her grades up.
Thirty-year-old Officer Yang, who'd been with the force for six years, noticed something I'd missed. "The last person to see her alive," he said, pointing at a name in the tenant registry. "This guy on the sixth floor—Cheng Weiguo. He's the only male tenant in the building who's under forty and lives alone."
I looked at the registry. Cheng Weiguo, twenty-seven, originally from the countryside, worked in construction management. He'd been living in the building for about a year.
"Let's talk to him," I said.
Cheng Weiguo wasn't home when we knocked. His neighbor, a middle-aged woman with curlers in her hair, told us he usually worked late and came home after nine.
"What about the girl on the seventh floor?" Hal asked. "Did you ever see her with anyone?"
The woman's face twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile, wasn't quite a sneer. "That girl? She was pretty. Always coming and going at odd hours."
She paused, then added: "She and Cheng Weiguo were close. I saw them together more than once."
I filed that away and moved on.
Grandma Yu, when I pressed her, admitted that Hannah and Cheng Weiguo had been spending time together. "He helped her with things—carrying groceries, fixing a leaky faucet. That's what young men do, isn't it? It didn't seem like anything unusual."
But something about the way she said it made me think she was holding back.
---
The forensic results came back, and they painted a grim picture.
Hannah Xue had died between 10 PM and midnight on June 3rd. She'd been alive when she entered the water tank—the scratches on her fingers confirmed it. She'd fought to get out, clawing at the smooth metal walls until her fingernails broke and her fingertips bled. But the tank was deep, the walls were slick with algae, and the lid had been padlocked from the outside.
She'd drowned in a tank of water on a rooftop in the middle of a city of eight million people, and no one had heard her screams.
The padlock was a heavy-duty model, the kind used on construction sites. It had been cut open by the maintenance worker who discovered the body. We traced the lock to a hardware store three kilometers away—purchased with cash two days before Hannah died. The store's security camera showed a figure in a dark hoodie, face obscured, paying in exact change.
The building's security footage was more helpful. On the night of June 3rd, at approximately 11 PM, a young woman matching Hannah's description had entered the building through the underground garage. She appeared to be visiting someone, though the camera angle didn't capture which floor she went to.
At 11:47 PM, a figure in a dark hoodie—the same one from the hardware store—was seen exiting the stairwell on the sixteenth floor, which connected to the roof access.
The figure's build was consistent with a tall, slim male.
Cheng Weiguo was tall and slim.
I brought him in for a second interview, and this time, I pushed harder.
He continued to deny everything. He had an alibi for the night in question—he'd been at a work dinner until after ten, and his colleagues confirmed it. When he got home, he'd gone straight to bed.
I was stuck.
Hal, who'd been listening from the observation room, pulled me aside after the interview. "The guy's clean," he said. "I don't think he did it."
"Then who?"
Hal shrugged. "Maybe we're looking at this wrong. What if it wasn't about Hannah at all? What if she was in the wrong place at the wrong time?"
I thought about the padlock. The figure in the hoodie. The rooftop access.
What if someone had been waiting on the roof that night—not for Hannah specifically, but for whoever came along?