The Circle Thief
I had some luck. I found something.
Linda's social circle wasn't large—she enjoyed reading, gardening, and posting flattering selfies. According to her best friend, Linda was tight-lipped, soft-spoken, warm but guarded, and strikingly beautiful. She was deeply in love with her boyfriend, and they'd even traveled to Europe for National Day—her only flaw was being a terrible cook. Honestly, near-perfect.
When I asked who might have grudges against Linda, her friend hesitated. "I don't know if this counts as a grudge. Officer, do you know that kind of person—the kind who copies someone else's life to fake their own?"
I didn't follow. She elaborated: "Linda loved taking selfies, but only posted them on her Circle. In June this year, I was scrolling through this social app and suddenly found a mini influencer using all of Linda's photos—just cropping Jay out. The account already had tens of thousands of followers, comments full of 'goddess' and 'wifey'—people were even sending gifts. Linda was horrified. Who'd have thought someone in her Circle was lurking like that, monitoring her life? She'd post a selfie and within minutes, they'd upload it to that other platform."
I frowned. "What happened next?"
"We reported it! Linda also posted about it in her Circle, hinting around, but nobody came forward. Officer... could it be that when the account got taken down for violations, that person decided to kill Linda? Is it my fault? I never meant to—"
The blog that had been stealing Linda's life had been deleted. Finding the person behind it was like looking for a needle in the ocean.
My lead went cold, too.
Not only did both leads die, but the medical examiner delivered an unbelievable finding: Linda had not been sexually assaulted.
---
On the third day after the hedgehog disappeared, the entire team sat frowning at the case conference.
Based on the victim's condition, the killer clearly intended to assault her, but ultimately didn't—only one explanation: the crime was interrupted. I refused to believe a killer who brought a knife and slashed her throat without hesitation would back down out of conscience. Something else stopped him—like—
"The delivery driver!"
I slapped the table. Mentor nodded. "Pull the security footage. Look for a man leaving Riverside Gardens with a delivery bag after 19:03. Approximately 175cm, medium build but on the slim side, possibly wearing a mask or baseball cap to hide his face. He'd have removed his jacket—wearing just a shirt underneath."
I understood Mentor's reasoning. From the defensive wounds, the killer was roughly 10 centimeters taller than Linda. He was strong enough to overpower her on the sofa but needed a weapon for courage—not heavily built. The blood spatter pattern meant he was definitely bloodied, but the guard at the gate didn't remember seeing anyone leave covered in blood. The killer wouldn't have left soaked—nor would he have walked out shirtless. He must have worn a jacket on arrival and taken it off when he left.
With a direction at last, Hal and I pulled two-hour shifts and finally narrowed down our suspect.
On the night of the murder at 18:50, a man in a black mask and black jacket entered the complex. At 19:12, the man left—his jacket wrapped around something tucked under his arm, wearing a navy crew-neck T-shirt instead, carrying a delivery bag in his other hand.
Time and profile: a near-perfect match.
But this was only the beginning.
Armed with security stills, we systematically interviewed Linda's friends, family, colleagues, even former clients. No one recognized the man in the photos.
Unwilling to give up, we turned to the surveillance network. The suspect left the complex on foot, reached a shantytown area, and vanished into the labyrinth of narrow alleys—no further trace.
In frustration, Mentor deployed two teams to search the Riverside Gardens area and the shantytown around the clock.
A resident claimed that two days before the murder, they'd seen a man resembling the suspect arguing with Linda, assuming it was a lovers' quarrel and paying no attention.
But the shantytown had existed for decades—an urban blight of cramped alleys, diverging paths, and illegal structures. Officers plunged into the web and couldn't even tell north from south, let alone extract useful leads.
Other cases kept piling in. The whole team was running ragged.
On the seventh day after Linda's death, I stayed up all night reviewing files.
I knew the old adage—"the net of heaven has large meshes, but lets nothing through." I knew Locard's exchange principle: any perpetrator leaves traces, and from those traces the killer can be found.
But I also knew that a week of work had produced lead after lead that went nowhere. The case was stuck.
The killer knew Linda, yet had never appeared in her social circle. Armed with a knife, he'd broken into her home to assault her. The assault was interrupted, and in those circumstances, he took only an 18cm hedgehog plushie?
---
Two weeks after the hedgehog vanished, the case took a turn.
One afternoon, Jay suddenly came to find me, asking if we could trace the owner of a social media account. I'd just closed a drug-related robbery case—pulled an all-nighter, hadn't shaved or washed my face, was about to head home to sleep—and I wasn't in a good mood. I told him it wasn't our department's jurisdiction.
"Officer Ryan, this account is using all of Linda's photos, but it's still updating. It can't be Linda."
My temple throbbed. I grabbed Jay's phone.
It was a social app focused on voice chat and gaming companionship. The profile picture was one of Linda's selfies, with over thirty thousand followers. The gift leaderboard showed hundreds of thousands in tips, and the personal feed was full of nothing but gift screenshots, charity livestream appeals, and cutesy voice messages, alongside the content originally posted in Linda's Circle. Based on the earliest selfie's upload date, the account had been active since late June.
Mentor's hedgehog also turned up.
From Linda's selfies, she clearly adored that hedgehog—most of her photos featured it. Even during the Golden Week trip to Europe with Jay, she'd brought it along and taken plenty of pictures.
Without waiting for Jay to process, I grabbed him and bolted straight for the cybercrime unit.
When we found the account owner, she didn't even know Linda was dead.
The woman in the interrogation room was short but very curvy, with a head of over-processed blonde hair, wearing a designer coat over a thousand dollars, carrying a handbag whose name I still can't pronounce. Despite her attempts to project sophistication, her cheap demeanor was glaringly obvious—from the way she smoked to the way she crossed her legs, every gesture screamed pretense.
"I can find things," the woman said proudly. "And I can also make people."
Up close and personal, I saw the thick makeup caked on her face and the coarseness beneath her display of wealth.
She refused to cooperate at first, haughtily demanding: "Why should I tell you anything?"
After playing good cop-bad cop for a while, she finally opened up.
Her name was Wendy, thirty years old, unmarried, living alone in the city, working retail.
"I think my life is pretty good—I have a younger brother, my parents favor him, and I'm just a burden. My brother's family is well-off, but they never help me. I—" Wendy laughed bitterly, "—I never asked them for money."
She also insisted she was just a "fan."
"I don't know her, but I just like her photos... I mean, I don't want to give them back, but I don't want to either..."
"Then why did you steal them?" I was starting to lose patience.
Wendy tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I just—find them... find her... who is she anyway? Someone who doesn't even know she's being copied, someone who should be killed for making me feel like this, making me feel the one I'm a fan of doesn't even respond to me—"
That sentence was falling apart.
Wendy's account had been verified on the platform, turning Linda's stolen images into a profitable persona, then transferred across platforms—a classic operation. A single livestream could earn thousands. Offline, she charged hundreds per hour for "companionship." She even posted promotional blurbs like, "A girl's love, a lonely heart's solace—come see me," alongside provocative poses. For certain "generous" tippers, she sent voice messages and made video calls.
To prove she was "the real deal," she posted things that were supposedly "hers," but the photos were always carefully filtered to show no identifying details. She wasn't stupid.
"What platform do you operate on?"
Her eyes darted. She wanted to direct the conversation. Every time I zeroed in, she redirected to a safe topic.
I pushed: "How much money have you made off Linda's photos?"
"I—" Wendy pouted. "I spend a lot on gear and makeup. You think being pretty is cheap? Skincare, makeup, nice clothes, gym memberships—it's thousands a month. And I don't earn that much, so..." She gave me a pitiful look. "Can you not charge me?"
"I'm not here to charge you," I said. "I'm trying to find a killer. Your account might provide critical leads. Please cooperate."
She perked up at this, suddenly cooperative. She really thought she was the main character—someone had been murdered, and all she could think about was whether she'd be charged.
I had the account's internal data pulled and sorted. What I found made me sick.
Wendy was, for lack of a better term, an internet prostitute. She wasn't selling her body—she was selling Linda's. She'd never met a single client face-to-face; she only needed Linda's photos and a few voice messages, with zero investment and massive returns.
Some of her clients were truly pathetic—sending money to a fantasy, begging for "her" attention. Others used her for entertainment, tipping for fun, joking that they "knew she was fake but didn't care." And then there were those who treated her like a cheap commodity: "Sleep with me, or I'm gone."
Linda never knew any of this.
It was then that I realized the person who killed Linda might not be Wendy. She was a parasite, repulsive but not violent. She didn't want Linda dead—Linda was her source material.
The photos on the account were the same ones someone had stolen from Linda's private circle.