Silent Bones (Part 2)
By the time I was brought on board, I understood why Yang looked dissatisfied.
He'd miscalculated.
The man had no connection to Grandma Zhou.
The bureau had already lifted a fingerprint from the surface of the cement—left behind by someone who'd touched the wet concrete. It didn't match the man's prints. When he was pinned to the ground, he was still babbling about finding Sean Peng.
The man's name, he claimed, was Sun Yuwei. He was fifty years old, from Dadi Village in the county below the city.
But background checks showed that Sun Yuwei had never been married.
He did have a younger brother, Sun Yucheng, who'd died in a car crash five years ago. Sun Yucheng's son, Sean Peng, had received a life insurance payout and left the village, never to be seen again.
Under interrogation, Sun Yuwei—or whoever he was—contradicted himself at every turn. At first he claimed not to know Sean Peng and denied ever handing out missing person flyers. The phone number was new, he said; he'd only shown up because he heard there was money. Then he admitted Sean was his nephew and he'd only been searching for him to continue the family line.
Old He pressed him on what he'd shouted during the arrest. He said he couldn't remember—then changed his story, claiming he'd thought his nephew and his wife had committed crimes and he wanted to distance himself. Round and round, never admitting any real connection to Sean Peng or Gloria Guo.
At the man's flophouse, we found a bank book.
It showed regular monthly deposits for a year after Sun Yucheng's death. Then the payments grew sporadic, shrinking in amount, and eventually stopped. Two years later, the balance was zero.
Yang produced a life insurance policy from three years ago and laid it in front of the man. The man clutched the policy, and as he read it, something in him broke. He started pounding the table, cursing Sean Peng as an ingrate and Gloria Guo as a scheming whore who'd hidden away while sitting on his money. He demanded we execute them.
Yang asked why he cared so much about a policy he had no claim on. The beneficiary was Sean Peng. Sun Yuwei had no legal right to the money, so why demand a cut from his nephew and his wife?
The man's face twisted. Sometimes he claimed he'd slaved for Sun Yucheng's family—feeding his brother from age seven by begging neighbors' leftovers, working since he was ten to pay for his brother's schooling and his nephew's upbringing. Sometimes he fell back on "we're family, so what's mine is theirs and what's theirs is mine."
Yang called him greedy. Sun Yuwei, who'd poured his heart and soul into raising his brother's family, had helped his own son and daughter-in-law murder him for a payout!
The man's facial muscles spasmed. "You're making that up! That's slander!"
Yang asked, "When did Sun Yuwei start working?"
The man nodded.
"And Sun Yuwei never went to school. He was illiterate. How could he write missing person notices? How could he read an insurance policy?"
An illiterate man couldn't draft flyers or understand policy documents.
The man slumped in his chair, mouth opening and closing, unable to produce a single excuse.
Yang pressed harder. Sun Yuwei couldn't even write his own name. Five years ago, when he left the province for work, he'd signed his employment contract with a fingerprint. Meanwhile, the bureau had already contacted county police and was collecting personal items from Sun Yucheng's home for DNA comparison.
Looking at the man's ashen face, Yang softened his tone. "Besides documents, there are many ways to prove identity. The evidence against you is overwhelming. Your only path to leniency is full disclosure."
"I... I'll talk. I'll confess." The man finally poured everything out. "It was all their idea. They ruined me. They made it so I can't go home! Don't execute me. I didn't kill anyone—I didn't..."
Here was the truth:
Sun Yuwei and Sun Yucheng were brothers, three years apart, but they looked remarkably similar. Their father was an abusive alcoholic who beat their mother until she ran away. When Sun Yuwei was seven, their father got into a deadly fight with a neighbor over two chickens and was killed. Sun Yuwei took on the burden of raising his younger brother.
A deadbeat father produced an honest elder son—but that honest elder son, in turn, raised a spoiled younger one.
Sun Yuwei left home early, working construction and factory jobs to fund his brother's education, marriage, and eventually his nephew's schooling. He lived cheaply, stretched every penny, yet still managed to build a house in the village and buy a secondhand car for his brother.
Too bad Sun Yucheng was a waste. He dropped out of middle school, racked up gambling debts, and retreated to the village to live on welfare. His wife left him. His only redeeming legacy was Sean Peng, who'd at least finished vocational school—the family's one thin thread of hope.
Five years ago, Sean Peng met eighteen-year-old Gloria Guo.
Gloria sold insurance. To help her make quota, Sean Peng bought policies for himself and his father, naming each other as beneficiaries.
That spring festival, Sean Peng brought Gloria home to meet the family. Sun Yuwei came back from the city to meet his future niece-in-law. Gloria was charming, talkative, and generous—she brought food and liquor, and the whole clan celebrated.
That night, Sun Yucheng and his son drank themselves into a stupor. Sun Yuwei, who had errands to run, took his brother's car and left.
The next morning, Sean Peng received a call from the police. A car had crashed into a mountainside. The fuel tank exploded. The driver's body was burned beyond recognition. The police identified him by the driver's license found in the vehicle—Sun Yucheng's.
Sean Peng looked at his father, passed out on the couch, and couldn't speak for a long moment.
Here was the twist: Sun Yuwei, rushing to leave, had forgotten his ID pouch. Sun Yucheng's driver's license had been sitting in the car. The vehicle crashed, the body was dismembered and charred, and the police had matched the wrong man to the wrong name.
The dead man was Sun Yuwei. The man sitting in our interrogation room was Sun Yucheng.
"I didn't want this," Sun Yucheng argued. "I told Sean to come clean with the police, but he and Gloria said the only way to collect the payout was if I was dead. My brother was a loner—barely made ten thousand a year. I was drowning in debt. Why not make the best of a bad situation?"
Under the couple's demonic persuasion, Sun Yucheng agreed to the fraud.
To avoid suspicions in the village, he left Dadi Village and went underground. Sean Peng promised to send money every month so he could live decently. After a few small payments, the couple vanished.
Sun Yucheng was bitter. He insisted everything was Sean and Gloria's idea. He'd only taken a cut, and it had cost him his home, his peace of mind, and his freedom.
Based on Sun Yucheng's confession, the case began to take shape.
Five years ago, Sean Peng, Gloria Guo, and Sun Yucheng had conspired to defraud the insurance company. Three years ago, after the money ran out, they escalated—Gloria's forged documents and fraudulent insurance schemes pointed directly at the Zhou family, and we could now hypothesize that both Justin Zhou and Maya were dead.
The investigation pressed forward. I pulled three all-nighters and nearly died sifting through mountains of paperwork.
On the fourth day, Yang shook me awake from a half-eaten donut. "Found it."
Last summer, one of Maya's private social media accounts had been accessed from an out-of-town location. The login was traced to a man named Derrick Tian.
Derrick had been Maya's classmate. He'd been in love with her for years. After Maya married, he'd continued sending her suggestive messages. Maya had firmly rejected him, and they'd stopped communicating.
But in the chat logs, "Maya" told Derrick that her marriage was failing, she was lonely, and she wanted a man who truly cared for her. Derrick, whose wife had died a year earlier, was overcome with excitement and confessed his own loneliness.
After obtaining Derrick's phone number, the account went dark permanently.
The language patterns in those messages suggested the person writing as "Maya" was a man.
We traced the account to an internet café in a neighboring city—and the face staring back at us from the surveillance footage wasn't Sean Peng.
It was Justin Zhou.
Further investigation revealed that Sean Peng, Justin Zhou, and Gloria Guo had all checked into a local hotel under false IDs—leading them directly to Derrick Tian.
Derrick was unemployed, living with his retired parents. His father was bedridden. And at that very moment, an unidentified man and woman were staying at Derrick's house. A month earlier, Derrick had sold a property and withdrawn every penny from his accounts.
The pattern was identical to Maya's behavior before she disappeared.
The web was getting larger and more tangled by the hour. What had really happened to the Zhou family? Where was Maya? Why was Justin Zhou—supposedly vanished—traveling with his mother's suspected killers and impersonating his wife to contact her former suitor? What had happened to Derrick Tian? And what roles did Sean Peng and Gloria Guo play?
Yang suspected that whatever had befallen the Zhou family was about to happen again.
To protect Derrick's parents, local officers posing as maintenance workers went to the door while we surrounded the property. Two suspects were apprehended on the spot.
The scene inside was ghastly.
Every window in the house was sealed shut. Trash piled in mountains. In the elderly parents' room, Derrick's father was skeletal, his legs ulcerated and festering, soiling the bed where he lay. Derrick's mother was naked on the bathroom floor, also emaciated, barely alive. Derrick himself was curled in a dog crate—beaten, bruised everywhere except his face, and mentally shattered.
The female suspect was Gloria Guo. The man wasn't Sean Peng.
It was Justin Zhou.
When we breached the door, the man my grandmother had described as timid and henpecked attacked us with a meat cleaver. He nearly took off my finger. It took three of us to subdue him.
Gloria tried to bolt. Yang barked her name once, and she dropped to the floor beside the couch.
From Derrick's mother, we learned that Sean Peng, Gloria, and Justin had been living in the house for over three months, taking turns buying supplies. When we made our move, Sean happened to be out.
Old He ordered Gloria to call Sean.
Gloria's hands shook as she dialed. "Honey... where are you?"
Sean, unsuspecting: "On my way back. What's up?"
Gloria glanced at Old He. "Nothing... did you buy the milk?"
A pause. "Yeah." He hung up.
Something tickled the back of my mind.
Yang spoke before I could: "Sean's running. Mobilize now!"
Old He looked confused. Yang strode over to Gloria and asked if she was allergic to dairy. She shrank into herself, shaking her head frantically.
He leaned in until she couldn't move, then said flatly: "I'll pour you a glass."
A chill shot down my spine.
Gloria burst into tears. "I—I didn't want him to get caught. I was wrong... I'm sorry—"
Sean escaped. Old He and I assumed "milk" was a code phrase, but Yang pointed out that among the towers of garbage in the Tian house, there wasn't a single empty dairy container.
Justin Zhou refused to cooperate, even denying his own identity. Old He suggested leaning on Gloria—her psychological defenses had already crumbled. Yang neither agreed nor disagreed.
This time, Old He was right.
Gloria talked easily, but she claimed to know almost nothing of substance.
According to her, everything that appeared suspicious—the overlapping coincidences, the cascading chain of crimes—was just a series of simple frauds that happened to intersect.
Seven years ago, she'd helped Sean collect the insurance money, and they'd lived well for a while—until the money ran out.
It's easy to fall from riches to rags and hard to climb back. To fund their lifestyle, Gloria started forging documents and selling bogus insurance policies.
It was around that time she met Maya. Maya owed her two thousand yuan in gambling debts and wouldn't pay. Gloria sent her boyfriend to "scare" Maya. She had no idea that Sean had demanded twenty thousand or that he'd come away empty-handed.
When the scam victims started demanding refunds, Gloria couldn't keep up, and Sean whisked her away to a neighboring city to lie low.
The following year, they crossed paths with Justin Zhou again—only he was using a fake name.
They found it odd, but as career con artists, they let it slide. Before long, Justin and Sean had bonded like brothers. Justin looked soft, but he had nerves. He was first to volunteer for the things Sean wouldn't dare.
Sean was the brains. Gloria provided the insurance expertise. Justin was the muscle. Their rickety little crew committed petty extortion and lived like kings—for a while.
As for the Tian household, Gloria said they didn't know them well.
Derrick had come to them.
According to Gloria, Derrick and Justin had known each other casually. After they'd settled in the area, Justin had gone drinking with Derrick a few times. Each time Derrick got drunk, he'd complain about his wife dying in an accident, about his mother hoarding the compensation money, about having to beg for every cigarette.
Misery curdled into rage. His father was a burden. His mother was a miser. The money came from his dead wife's life, and they consumed every cent. He couldn't fight back without being called unfilial—worth being struck by lightning.
Gloria said, "He knew what Justin did for a living..."
Old He cut in. "What kind of living?"
Gloria hedged. "You know... cheating people. Once, he said he couldn't take it anymore and asked us to pose as debt collectors. Scare his mother into paying twenty thousand. If we got the money, he'd give us a cut. I didn't have any say in it—I just went along."
But Mrs. Tian claimed the money was already spent on her husband's medical bills. Twenty thousand was impossible. Her son could have her life, but he wasn't getting cash. Derrick blew up and invited the three of them to move in permanently—using their presence to terrorize his parents into paying up.
"There was nothing I could do," Gloria said, tears running down her face. "All those men were on edge—I couldn't leave. Derrick wouldn't let anyone care for his father. Said the old man should've died years ago. When his mother argued, he locked her in the bathroom. What was I supposed to do? I couldn't go to the police. I couldn't run..."
Old He asked: If Derrick was the mastermind, why was he locked in a dog cage?