The Neighbors (Part 2)
The next few days were a blur of interviews, evidence review, and dead ends.
Hal and I canvassed every floor, every apartment, every balcony overlooking the roof. The building's upper floors had a clear sightline to the water tank area, but the roof itself was only accessible through a keyed door on the sixteenth floor—and the key was supposed to be held exclusively by building management.
Except that the lock on the roof access door was old and easily picked. And the key had been copied so many times that half the building probably had one.
I went back to the security footage and spent twelve hours reviewing it frame by frame. The figure in the dark hoodie entered the stairwell at 10:47 PM and exited at 12:13 AM. Between those times, the camera on the ground floor lobby captured no one entering or leaving via the main entrance.
But there was something else—a detail I'd missed on the first pass.
At 10:32 PM, approximately fifteen minutes before the figure appeared, a woman had entered the building through the underground garage. She was tall, slender, wearing a sundress and carrying a small backpack. The image quality was poor, but the timestamp matched the window between Hannah entering the building and the figure appearing.
I ran the image through facial recognition. No match.
I was about to give up for the night when my phone rang. It was Officer Yang.
"Captain," he said, his voice tight. "I think you need to see this."
---
He'd been reviewing the interview transcripts from the initial canvass and found something that had slid past all of us. One of the seventh-floor tenants—a quiet, middle-aged woman who worked as a hospital administrator—had mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that she'd heard footsteps on the roof around 11 PM on June 3rd.
"I didn't think anything of it at the time," she'd told the responding officer. "People go up there sometimes to smoke or make phone calls. It's not unusual."
But her unit was directly below the rooftop access door, and the footsteps she'd heard weren't random. They were heavy, deliberate, and they stopped near the water tank.
And then they stopped altogether.
She hadn't heard anyone come back down.
"We assumed the person took the elevator," I said.
"She also said something else," Yang continued. "Right after the footsteps stopped, she heard a thud. Like something heavy being dropped. And then—nothing."
A thud. Something heavy. The padlock being secured?
I went back to the time stamp. The figure in the hoodie exited the stairwell at 12:13 AM. But between 11 PM and midnight, no one was seen on any of the building's cameras—neither entering nor leaving.
How did the killer get in and out without being seen?
Unless they never left.
---
I requested a full forensic sweep of the rooftop and water tank area. The tech team found what I was looking for: traces of blood on the ladder leading up to the tank—not Hannah's, but someone else's. A male, type O.
The DNA didn't match Cheng Weiguo.
But it did match someone else in the system—a man named Wu Yan, twenty-nine, with a prior arrest for stalking. He'd been picked up three years ago when a college student filed a complaint, but the charges had been dropped when the victim refused to testify.
Wu Yan lived on the sixth floor. Cheng Weiguo's floor.
I pulled his file and discovered what Officer Yang had already uncovered: Wu Yan had been a maintenance worker for the building management company five years ago, before transitioning to his current job as an engineer. He'd had full access to the building—every key, every passcode, every rooftop entrance.
When we brought Wu Yan in for questioning, he was calm and cooperative. Tall and lean, with the kind of face you'd forget five minutes after seeing it—except for his eyes, which were flat and empty, like the eyes of a fish in a market display case.
He answered every question promptly, offered information we hadn't asked for, and never once showed a flicker of emotion when we mentioned Hannah's name.
I couldn't shake the feeling that he was hiding something.
"Wu Yan," I said, leaning across the table, "did you know Hannah Xue?"
"No," he said. "I've seen her in the hallway. That's all."
"Did you ever speak to her?"
"No."
"Did you ever go up to the roof on the night of June 3rd?"
"No. I was at home, sleeping."
"Can anyone confirm that?"
"I live alone."
It was the same flat,Empty tone. No hesitation, no nervousness, no defensiveness. Just... nothing.
I let him go. We didn't have enough to hold him.
---
That night, I sat alone in the office, staring at the evidence board. Hal had gone home, Yang was working another case, and the building was quiet except for the hum of the air conditioning.
The padlock. The blood. The footsteps. The thud. The figure in the hoodie.
I went back to the security footage one more time and found what I was looking for.
At 12:13 AM, the figure in the hoodie exited the stairwell on the sixteenth floor. The camera showed them walking quickly toward the elevator bank, head down, gait even.
But at 12:14 AM—sixty seconds later—the same figure appeared on the sixteenth-floor camera. This time, they were walking in the opposite direction, toward the stairwell door.
Two figures, not one. The first was going out; the second was going back in. They'd passed each other in the elevator lobby, just out of camera range.
And the second figure—the one returning to the stairwell at 12:14 AM—wasn't wearing the hoodie anymore. They were in jeans and a T-shirt, the kind of casual clothes anyone might wear at home.
The image was grainy, but I recognized the build. The height. The flat, empty walk.
Wu Yan.
He'd worn the hoodie to the roof, removed it after securing the padlock, and returned to his apartment via the stairwell. The hoodie had been found in the stairwell's trash chute two days later—no DNA, no fibers, no useful evidence.
It was circumstantial. But it was enough.
We brought Wu Yan in for a third interview. This time, I had something he didn't expect: forensic evidence linking him to the padlock—a purchase record from a local hardware store, paid in cash, but the timestamp on the store's security camera matched his physical description.
Faced with the evidence, Wu Yan's composed exterior finally cracked.
He didn't weep or rage or deny. He simply... deflated. The empty mask fell away, and beneath it was a creature so hollow, so fundamentally broken, that I couldn't tell if I was looking at a human being or the shell of one.
He confessed to stalking Hannah Xue for months, ever since she'd moved into the building. He'd watched her from the stairwell, timed her schedule, learned her routines. He knew which nights she studied late, which days she went to the library, which evenings she walked to the convenience store for snacks.
When she'd rejected his advances—he'd approached her once in the hallway, tried to start a conversation, and she'd politely but firmly walked away—he'd decided she needed to be punished.
On the night of June 3rd, he'd followed her up to the roof. He'd forced her into the water tank at knifepoint and locked the padlock behind him. He'd disabled the roof security camera weeks in advance and chosen a Saturday night when the building would be quiet.
As he told his story, his face remained flat—a mask of calm that didn't waver even as he described Hannah's screams and the sound of her fingernails scratching against the inside of the tank.
I wanted to punch him.
But the law would deal with him now. Hannah Xue would get justice—even if it came too late to save her.
As the officers led Wu Yan away, Grandma Yu sat in the hallway outside the interview room, weeping softly.
"She was so young," the old woman said. "Nineteen years old. She had her whole life ahead of her."
I couldn't argue with that.
What I couldn't stop thinking about, though, was the way Wu Yan had described Hannah's final moments. Not with remorse. Not with satisfaction. But with the detached curiosity of a man watching an insect drown in a glass of water.
Some people, I thought, are just born wrong. And the worst part is, you never see them coming until it's too late.
He lived one floor below her. He'd passed her in the hallway, nodded politely, held the elevator door. He'd been the quiet neighbor who never caused trouble—until he did.
The neighbors. That's what this case taught me. The danger isn't always the stranger in the dark alley. Sometimes it's the person on the other side of the wall, listening to every footstep, tracking every movement, waiting for the right moment.
Sometimes the monster isn't hiding under the bed. He's next door, smiling and nodding and saying good morning.
And you'd never know until the water stopped running.