Silent Bones (Part 4)
A household like that was a fat pig, ripe for squeezing. Most importantly, under the cult-like "family rules," victims would quickly internalize their own oppression. Rather than flee, they'd turn on their own flesh and blood for a scrap of food or a sip of water—people who'd betray their own families didn't deserve wealth, didn't deserve a decent life. That was Gloria's gospel, delivered with the authority of a prophet.
Justin revealed: "She said real families protect each other, the way she protected me. Only fake families sell each other out for food and water. People who abandon their own—who betray blood—don't deserve to live well."
Based on these selection criteria, Justin targeted Derrick Tian. He knew Derrick had a nasty personality, few friends, minimal workplace connections, and two properties to his name. Perfect.
But Gloria was cautious. She suggested that Justin impersonate Maya first, contact Derrick online, gather intelligence, and confirm he was worth the trouble before making a move.
"What happened next, you already know." Justin's hands were knotted together, his head bowed. "When I reached out to him, I found out his wife had just died in an accident and he'd gotten a fat insurance payout. So we went for it... I'm not lying at this point. Derrick made the first move. Since he asked for it, I had no reason to pass up easy money. Once we moved in, Gloria's methods worked just as well as they had before. She's so good at reading people..."
Justin's confession tied together nearly every loose end.
And I was chilled to the bone.
Gloria Guo—twenty-three years old, the woman who'd burst into tears at the mere sight of Yang, who'd cowered in the interrogation room like a frightened rabbit—she'd orchestrated crimes of staggering cruelty and cunning.
When Yang left the room, I still hadn't recovered from the shock.
Old He intercepted him first. "Yang, were there glove marks in the cement?"
Yang shook his head. "No."
Old He stared. "Then when you told him—"
"I didn't say anything. He said it himself."
Old He wiped his face. "Sure, Justin wasn't in his right mind when he disposed of the body, so he probably didn't think to wear gloves. But what if Sean hadn't worn gloves either and just didn't leave prints? Then your whole bluff would've been useless."
Yang smiled. "Doesn't matter. A bluff's a bluff. It worked, didn't it?"
"..."
I asked Old He quietly whether Yang's gambit was even legal. Old He asked what wasn't legal about it.
Based on Justin's confession, we recovered a car with switched plates parked near the Tian house. Inside: cash covered in fingerprints, fake IDs, SIM cards, and a ledger. Gloria, it turned out, kept meticulous records of every large transaction—documenting each person's "cut."
Confronted with the evidence, Gloria shed her lamb's fleece.
She asked Yang for a cigarette.
He gave her one.
She looked at him, her reddened eyes glistening. "I know you can't stand people like us. But I was terrified of being poor."
If you'd experienced what I've been through, you'd understand me.
The same words, spoken by a different mouth, carried a seductive, almost hypnotic weight.
"I grew up in the mountains. Have you ever been to a place like that? Mud-brick houses. Summers so hot you break out in heat rash. Winters so cold you're afraid to put your feet on the floor. And on top of all that, I had to cook over an open fire in the dog days, and in the dead of winter I washed clothes for the whole family. Six people in our house—I was the third child. My mother was what they called simple-minded. My oldest sister too. My second sister was sold. My little brother did nothing but cry."
Gloria flicked ash. "If a teacher hadn't come to our village on a volunteer posting, I wouldn't have finished elementary school. When I was fourteen, my father arranged a marriage. The man was forty years old and still couldn't find a wife. He paid three thousand yuan for a broker to bring him a bride. Brokers like him steal girls. But before he could get his hands on me, the police caught him. Three thousand yuan—poof, gone."
"Three thousand was the price of a grown woman. I wasn't worth that much. I remember my teacher telling me, Sanmei, you're smart. You need to get out. The world out there is big. But he told me to leave—didn't give me any money."
Gloria smiled. "You know what? If you hadn't caught that broker, my father would've sold me. I didn't want to marry an old man, didn't want to cook and wash clothes for his seventeen relatives. So I stole two eggs and ran. I ate garbage all the way—out of the village, out of the township, all the way to the county seat."
"The world out there really is big. So big there's nowhere to land. I found an old scavenger, and I told him: give me food and I'll give you a baby. He brought home scraps from other people's plates, but I didn't want scraps—I wanted meat. So he went out and staged traffic accidents for insurance money. That's when I learned that in the city, there are lots of ways to survive."
She hadn't kept her promise to the old man, though. When he'd tried to undress, she'd bitten him hard and run again. She scratched and scraped and hustled, and by a stroke of luck, a few charitable souls helped her through a year of night school, and she landed a job selling insurance.
Gloria was smart, but being smart didn't guarantee a good life.
She thought she'd found stability. But the insurance industry demanded connections she didn't have and a thick skin she couldn't stomach. She didn't have the network. What she had was her face—and she couldn't stomach the hungry men or the ugly transactions that came with it.
At the bottom of the sales rankings, her dream life drifted further and further away. That was when she met Sean Peng.
Through Sun Yucheng's shady earnings, Sean had money—but not the kind that came with prestige. To Gloria, he was a handsome boy from a family with cash. They fell in love fast. Sean bought policies in her name and recruited friends to do the same, boosting her numbers until she was intoxicated by him—until he brought her to Dadi Village to meet the family.
"That's when I realized I'd gone blind." Gloria watched the ash creep toward her fingers, her voice low. "I'd crawled out of one village—I wasn't about to crawl into another. I'd rather die than go back to waking up every day deciding whether to wash clothes first or feed the pigs. Then his uncle died, and I thought—this is my way out. What's the point of working? You spend your whole life as garbage people step on, answering to bosses and clients."
She looked Yang in the eye. "I wanted money. I wanted a good life."
From that point on, Gloria's trajectory warped beyond recognition.
She had an uncanny gift for reading people. She exploited every weakness she found—the elder Sun's laziness, Sean's ignorance, Grandma Zhou's superstition, Maya's selfishness, Justin's obsession, Derrick's greed. The basest instincts of human nature became her tools.
A girl who'd grown up being treated as property, who carried the shadow of her father's attempt to sell her—once she discovered her talent for manipulation, what she craved wasn't just money. It was the intoxicating power of controlling others, of punishing "betrayers" on a whim.
She refused to be an object ever again.
Better than an object—be a god who uses objects.
Even though she hadn't anticipated Justin's monstrous growth, she maintained her hold on him, turning him into another instrument.
When pressed, Gloria refused to admit that she'd instructed anyone to commit crimes. She'd only wanted a good life, she said, and they'd helped her achieve it. She was still the pitiful, weak woman, trapped among people who kept breaking the law, too scared to call the police, too scared to run.
Yang didn't press her further. In exchange for her assistance in capturing Sean, he offered the possibility of a reduced sentence.
---
After Sean was apprehended, he proved just as delusional as Justin. He insisted that Gloria had signaled him—saying "milk"—to warn him, and that our claim of her betrayal was a ploy to extract confessions damaging to her.
Yang told him he was an idiot. Gloria's cunning assessment was crystal clear: the milk signal was a performance. A show of devotion designed to make herself look like a tragic heroine, lower our guard, and make it easier to spin lies.
Sean thought for a long moment, then shook his head. "You don't understand. She loves me."
In the end, Sean took full responsibility for every crime, cementing Justin's murder conviction as well.
When Justin dragged Maya back, Sean hadn't laid a finger on her.
The one who strangled Maya in a fit of rage was Justin.
---
Case closed. The sun was coming up. I crouched on the curb, trying to light a cigarette, but my lighter had taken on water and wouldn't spark. Yang appeared behind me, held out a flame, and asked if I wanted to be a detective.
"Come on, Chief," I said, grinning through the exhaustion. "I'd like to live long enough to collect a pension."
He didn't push it. I held back for a long moment, then asked whether he'd thought I looked like a fool the day the barrel was dredged up.
He shook his head. "Like a detective."
I shook mine. "I can't do it. I can't stomach self-serving justifications—people dressing up their crimes as 'circumstances' while the real victims die in silence, unheard."
He smiled. "That's exactly why you'd make a good one."