Silent Bones (Part 6)
Gloria told him that although they'd secured a substantial sum, three people would burn through it quickly. She didn't want to live poor ever again. They needed a new household to exploit.
The ideal target had to meet several criteria.
First, the household had to include more than one person. This allowed Gloria to stage her "family meetings"—inciting the victims to abuse and punish one another. As long as the perpetrators weren't Sean, Gloria, or Justin, no one could pin a murder charge directly on them.
Second, the target needed substantial savings and real property. Cash was petty change. The real money was in real estate—sell the house, and you had a windfall. A car, with switched plates and basic modifications, became a reliable getaway vehicle.
Third, the target needed a simple social network. If the household members had few connections, a single text claiming they'd emigrated or moved away for business would delay any alarm. By the time anyone grew suspicious, Sean, Gloria, and Justin would be long gone.
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 betrayed their own families didn't deserve wealth or comfort. That was Gloria's gospel, preached with the certainty 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 don't deserve a good life."
Based on these selection criteria, Justin targeted Derrick Tian. He knew Derrick had a nasty personality, few friends, minimal social connections, and two properties. A perfect mark.
But Gloria was cautious. She suggested that Justin impersonate Maya first, contact Derrick online, gather intelligence, and verify he was worth the trouble before making a move.
"What happened after that, 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 and he'd gotten a fat insurance payout. We went for it. I'm not lying—not anymore. Derrick made the first move. Since he asked for it, I had no reason to pass up easy money. And 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 up nearly every loose end.
And I was chilled to the bone.
Gloria Guo—twenty-three years old, the woman who burst into tears at the sight of Yang, who cowered in the interrogation room like a frightened rabbit—she had orchestrated crimes of staggering cruelty and cunning.
When Yang left the room, I still hadn't recovered from the shock.
Old He intercepted him in the hallway. "Yang, were there glove marks in the cement?"
Yang shook his head. "No."
Old He stared. "Then when you told Justin—"
"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 was useless."
Yang smiled. "Does it matter? A bluff's a bluff. It worked."
"..."
I asked Old He quietly whether Yang's gambit was even legal. Old He gave me a look that said he didn't understand the question.
---
Based on Justin's confession, we found a car with switched plates parked near the Tian residence. Inside: cash covered in fingerprints, fake identification documents, prepaid SIM cards, and a ledger. Gloria, it turned out, kept meticulous records of every large transaction—documenting each person's "cut."
Faced with the evidence, Gloria finally shed her lamb's fleece.
She asked Yang for a cigarette.
He gave her one.
She looked at him, 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.
The same words, spoken from 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 of summer, and in the dead of winter, I washed clothes for the whole family. Six of us in the house—I was the third child. My mother was what they called simple. My oldest sister too. My second sister was sold off. My little brother couldn't stop crying."
Gloria flicked the ash from her cigarette. "If a teacher hadn't come to our village as a volunteer, I wouldn't have finished elementary school. When I was fourteen, my old man arranged a marriage. The groom was forty and still couldn't find a wife. He paid three thousand yuan to a broker for a bride. Brokers like that steal girls. But before he could get his hands on me, the police caught him. Three thousand—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 clever. You need to get out. The world out there is big. But he told me to leave—he didn't give me any money."
Gloria smiled. "You know what? If you hadn't caught that broker, my father would have sold me. I didn't want to marry an old man. I didn't want to cook and wash clothes for his seventeen relatives. So I stole two eggs and ran. Ate garbage the whole 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 told him: feed me 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 payouts. That's when I learned that in the city, there are all kinds of ways to survive."
She hadn't kept her promise to the old man. When he tried to undress her, she'd bitten him hard and run again. She hustled and scraped and scraped and hustled, and by a stroke of luck, a few charitable souls helped her through a year of night school. She landed a job selling insurance.
Gloria was clever. But being clever didn't guarantee a good life.
She thought she'd found stability, only to discover that the insurance industry demanded connections she didn't have and a thick skin she couldn't stomach. She had no network—only her face. And she couldn't tolerate 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—though not the reputable kind. 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 sales until she was intoxicated with 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 crawl toward her fingers, her voice barely above a whisper. "I'd crawled out of one village—I wasn't crawling 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 chance. 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—and an equally uncanny ability to exploit every weakness she found. The elder Sun's laziness, Sean's ignorance, Grandma Zhou's superstition, Maya's selfishness, Justin's obsessive loyalty, Derrick's greed. The basest instincts of human nature became her tools.
A girl who'd grown up being treated as an object, who carried the shadow of her own father trying to sell her for cash—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" at will.
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 evolution, she maintained her hold on him, turning him into another instrument of her will.
When pressed, Gloria refused to admit that she had instructed anyone to commit crimes. She 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 go to 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 was evident in every calculation: the milk signal was pure performance. A show of devotion designed to make herself look like a tragic heroine, lower our guard, and give her room to spin more 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 from her attempted escape, Sean hadn't laid a finger on her.
The one who strangled Maya in a fit of rage was Justin himself.
---
Case closed.
In the small hours of the morning, I crouched on the curb, trying to light a cigarette. My lighter had taken on water and wouldn't spark.
Yang appeared behind me and held out a flame. He 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 if 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 don't have it in me. I can't stomach self-justifying excuses—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."