Born Criminal (Part 1)
Twelve years ago, I was thirty-four and riding high in the city homicide squad.
I was on track for a promotion to deputy captain when Captain Trent suddenly brought in a police academy intern.
The young man's name was Ryan Yang. Among the chain-smoking veterans, he kept his head down, spoke little, and looked like a student who'd wandered into the wrong party.
The case that made his name—Trent and I were the only ones who watched it unfold from beginning to end.
When it closed, Trent called him into his office for a three-hour conversation.
Back then, I called him Young Yang.
Now, I call him Captain.
---
The case was bizarre.
On the night of March 8th, a storm with hail lashed the northern suburbs.
By 9 AM the next morning, the squad had received a call: an unidentified female body had been found in the northern outskirts, in a gruesome state. The caller was nearly scared out of his mind.
The body was hidden in a patch of low trees, about twenty meters from a dirt road. The torrential rain had collapsed a small hillside, revealing the toe of a red shoe—how the passerby had spotted it.
But the downpour had also destroyed trace evidence on the body. The muddy road made footprint recovery impossible. Collectible clues were extremely limited.
The woman wore a maternity winter coat, her clothes soaked in blood. She lay spread-eagle on the ground, with visible ligature marks on her neck.
Captain Trent said, "Pardon me," and pulled back the hem of her coat. That's when we saw it—her abdomen had been sliced open with a sharp blade, and the fetus was missing!
Seeing this horror, even in early spring, I broke into a cold sweat.
Young Yang, however, was calmer than expected.
No murder weapon was found at the scene, and no information could confirm the victim's identity.
Twelve years ago, technology wasn't what it is now. Fingerprint and DNA databases and the surveillance network were underdeveloped. We had to use old-school methods—identifying body features and cross-referencing missing persons reports.
The victim appeared to be around thirty, with fair skin, clearly an indoor worker. In her coat pocket was a receipt so water-damaged we could barely make out two items: medicated patches, six per box, and a bottle of polyvinyl alcohol eye drops, half-used.
This was painfully little to go on.
Young Yang, however, offered a suggestion: "Hal, could she be an accountant?"
That threw me.
He pointed to the eye drops. "Polyvinyl alcohol is an artificial tear, typically used for dry eyes. Medicated patches reduce swelling and promote circulation, but pregnant women shouldn't apply them to the waist or abdomen. If she was using them on herself, she'd only put them on her hands, shoulders, or neck. At the scene, I noticed a faint scent of medicated oil on her right hand and wrist."
Young Yang concluded that given the victim's age and constellation of symptoms—dry eyes, neck pain, and tendinitis—there was a good chance she was an accountant.
"Of course," he added, "it's just a hypothesis."
It was a bold hypothesis. The symptoms couldn't be confirmed, and using them to narrow down the victim's identity risked derailing the investigation.
I suspected he'd noticed other things he wasn't sharing, keeping his options open.
Four days later, an elderly woman reported that she couldn't reach her daughter-in-law. The missing woman was named Mia, twenty-eight years old, thirty-six weeks pregnant.
Her occupation: accountant at a real estate conglomerate.
Almost simultaneously, an abandoned premature infant was found three kilometers from the crime scene.
The baby was premature, small and gaunt, wrapped in a cotton-linen sheet, but clean.
DNA confirmed the infant was the fetus taken from Mia's body!
When the elderly woman came to identify the body, Mia's husband had just returned from out of town. He was a construction foreman working in a neighboring county—he'd only seen his wife twice since the Spring Festival.
Originally, the old woman had planned to move in after the holiday to care for her pregnant daughter-in-law, but her own husband had injured his back. By the time she sorted things out, Mia was already unreachable.
Mia's husband was eight years older than her, with a weathered face and calloused, scarred hands. He covered his face, tears seeping through his fingers.
"What happened? She was fine during the New Year. I just went away for work, and now she's gone? My baby's gone too... what happened?"
What happened, indeed.
The question hung heavy over everyone.
The autopsy report showed Mia died between 8 PM and 10 PM on March 8th. Her upper arms bore large bruises. She'd taken sleeping pills before death, and the cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation.
The weapon wasn't a rope or belt—it was softer, like a scarf or a long towel.
Mia's stomach contained undigested strawberries. Young Yang and I canvassed the area and, six kilometers from the crime scene, found a newly opened strawberry farm. The owner confirmed that Mia had visited with two other people in a private car on the day of the murder.
---
Born Criminal (Part 2)
Back at the precinct, an ambulance was pulling out with its lights flashing. I stopped a colleague to ask what happened.
He sighed. "Mia's family came to claim the body for burial. The old woman saw her daughter and had a hypertensive crisis on the spot. She fainted, and the coroner sent her to the hospital—"
Before he could finish, a voice cut in.
"What?"
I turned to see a young woman—Mia's sister-in-law or maybe a family friend—staring at my colleague with a pale face, trembling all over.
"She's... dead?"
Before we could react, she fainted.
Officer Yang caught her, and I helped rush her to the infirmary. Good thing she was young.
After settling her, I hurried back to the observation room.
Captain Trent stood with his arms crossed, watching the interrogation through the one-way mirror. Inside, the suspect—Leo, Mia's husband—was calmly discussing home layouts with the interrogator.
The interrogation room was heated, but the observation room felt like an icebox.
I was stunned. "Captain, what's going on?"
Trent's face was grim. "Can't you tell? Our man got played."
When Officer Yang and I visited Leo's home, all physical evidence related to the case had already been submitted for analysis. A colleague was using old-school rapport-building tactics—chatting, making small talk—to try to extract new leads from Leo.
No one expected the time-tested method to fail so spectacularly on a real estate consultant.
Leo had quickly taken control of the conversation, steering clear of the case entirely and redirecting toward an entirely new topic. Trent hadn't intervened, wanting to see how far Leo would go.
"He's enjoying this," Officer Yang murmured, stepping closer to the glass. "Enjoying the sensation of being in control. It makes him feel like the only winner."
Trent nodded. "Young and slippery. Hard to crack."
The colleague was called out, and Trent started "cooling" Leo—leaving him alone in the room. Leo lounged in his chair, looked at the one-way mirror, and flashed a strange smile.
I couldn't quite describe what was in that smile. Just a sense of cold calculation beyond what was normal.
If the interrogation room incident merely made Leo seem "difficult," the preliminary forensic results pushed things from "difficult" to "troublesome."
The fibers found in the potted plants were from a cotton-linen blend, commonly used for large shawls. But everything was too badly burned to extract useful information. Only a single drop of blood on the windowsill didn't match Leo, Mia, or their child—meaning a fourth person had been present.
---
Born Criminal (Part 3)
The key to solving the case wasn't forensic evidence or interrogation tactics. It was understanding who Leo really was.
The investigation revealed that Mia had been six months pregnant when she first came to our city. She'd moved here alone, fresh out of a small town, looking for work.
She found a job as a live-in nanny for a wealthy family—the same family that would later become her in-laws through her employment.
Wait, that's not quite right. Let me back up.
Mia wasn't the one who'd married into money. She'd been hired by Leo's parents to help care for their ailing grandmother. The family was well-off—Leo ran a successful business, and his wife, Tina, was a beautiful woman from a good family.
Mia was quiet, diligent, and pretty in a fragile way. Leo noticed her almost immediately.
What followed was a relationship that should never have happened. Mia was vulnerable—an undocumented migrant worker with no support system. Leo was powerful, wealthy, and accustomed to getting what he wanted.
When Mia became pregnant, everything changed.
Leo's wife, Tina, had been desperate to have a child. After years of failed fertility treatments, she'd convinced herself she was pregnant—wearing padded clothes, buying baby clothes, decorating a nursery. Her delusion was so complete that even Leo had played along, whether out of guilt or denial.
When Mia's pregnancy became visible, Leo saw an opportunity. He could take Mia's baby and give it to Tina, solving two problems at once: giving his wife the child she craved and disposing of the evidence of his affair.
But Mia refused to give up her baby.
And so, on the night of March 8th, Leo lured Mia to a remote location under the pretense of discussing the baby's future. He drugged her with sleeping pills, strangled her with a shawl, and cut the baby from her womb.
The child survived—barely. A premature infant, left beside the road in the cold, found by a passerby the following morning.
Leo, meanwhile, had staged the scene to look like a random attack. He burned the shawl and Mia's blood-soaked clothes in his fireplace, smashed his own car window with a hammer, and claimed he'd been attacked by an intruder.
But he'd overlooked two crucial details.
First, a partial fingerprint on the inside of the shawl's clasp—one that didn't match Mia or any known associate of hers, but did match a fourth individual.
Second, the security camera at the strawberry farm, which had captured Leo's car arriving and departing with two occupants—not one.
The car's GPS records, cell tower triangulation, and the timeline of events all corroborated each other. Leo had been at the crime scene, and he'd been with someone else.
That someone else, we would discover, was his wife, Tina.
Tina had known about the affair. She'd known about the pregnancy. And she'd known—had perhaps always known—that the baby was the only thing standing between her marriage and its destruction.
She'd gone along with Leo's plan, thinking that if they could just obtain this child, everything would go back to the way it was before.
But when she saw the baby—the tiny, premature, struggling thing—something in her broke.
She confessed everything.
In the end, Leo was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Tina was charged as an accessory. The baby survived and was placed in the care of Mia's family.
The case was closed, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth. A child had lost its mother. A woman had helped murder another woman to take her baby. And a man who should have protected both had chosen destruction over responsibility.
Some crimes are born from circumstance. Others are born from the heart.
Leo's heart was blacker than any ghost I'd ever encountered.
---
Side Story: Dumplings
November. Rain and snow lashed Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Inner Mongolia, while the south basked under clear skies. The sunsets grew ever more vivid, and the night only brought token gusts of cold wind that rattled the windows of the precinct.
My five-year-old phone buzzed with a call from my father, Paul Yuan.
I hit mute and shoved it back in my pocket, pinching the bridge of my nose. "Status report."
"Yes, sir!" Lily stood up. "Human remains found at the construction site behind the old cotton mill. Preliminary estimate: death occurred approximately thirty years ago. Female, aged twenty-eight to thirty, height approximately 165 centimeters. No visible external trauma on the bones, so the cause of death requires further testing."
My apprentice Ryan projected the scene photos onto the wall. "The body was found curled inside a red suitcase, wearing a green top, white outer jacket, and denim bell-bottoms. Undergarments intact, but no shoes, no jewelry, and no identification."
Lily chewed on her pen. "That outfit was pretty fashionable thirty years ago, right? She probably went to clubs and bars a lot—" She broke off as her phone buzzed. "Takeout's here, I'll get it!"
I watched the fresh-faced recruit scurry out. Ryan grinned. "Newbies are so eager. Old Hal wouldn't budge if he were starving."
Hal kicked Ryan's chair and scowled. Our newcomer returned with takeout containers, distributing them around the table.
My phone buzzed again. I swiped to decline and looked up just as Lily held out an open container. Two neat rows of dumplings. Before the smell hit my nostrils, my stomach reacted—acid surged into my throat, and I bolted for the bathroom.
Ryan's whispered complaint followed: "Who ordered dumplings? The captain's allergic to dumplings..."
I retched until my stomach was empty, rinsed my mouth, splashed water on my face, and leaned against the sink, gasping. The face in the mirror was gaunt and stubbled—the kind of face a fortune teller would drag aside to warn about an ominous mark on my forehead.
This year had been brutal. Mass unemployment, businesses failing, desperate people turning to crime. And the desperate ones who stayed in the trade were getting better at it.
Every case felt like picking at an open wound.
My phone rang a third time. I answered, and an angry, slurred voice erupted from the speaker: "You ungrateful bastard! You won't take my calls? Give me the money!"
"You've been drinking again."
"This month's living expense, damn it—you don't support me, I'll march down to your station and make the government take care of me—"
I hung up and walked back to the office, where Lily was frantically packing up the takeout and Ryan was apologizing. I waved them off—I wasn't going to make the whole team skip lunch because of me.
"Leave it. I'll grab some bread. This case is obvious—murder and body disposal. The cotton mill neighborhood is under renovation, but since it's factory housing, we have the resident registry. Ryan, Lily, take the victim's clothing descriptions and canvas the area. Hal, cross-reference the missing persons reports from thirty years ago. Work hard tonight and close the rail yard case so we don't have to juggle two at once."
I grabbed my jacket and left, buying a bread roll from a convenience store, crouching on the curb to eat while my brain churned through the scene photos.
That fashionable outfit—I felt like I'd seen it somewhere before.
A thirty-year-old murder case was practically a cold case. Physical evidence was destroyed, and finding a witness in a sea of people was next to impossible. If we couldn't determine the cause of death or confirm the victim's identity, even the greatest detective in the world would be stuck. The only bright spot was that, based on the clothing, the killer likely knew the victim.
The next morning, I stopped by my father's place. He wasn't home—probably hadn't been back all night. Since my grandmother died in 2007, the old man had been on a downhill slide: laid off, drinking away his severance, rarely causing trouble, but never quite present either.
I left the wine I'd brought on the counter and drove to the station.
The day's work yielded little. But late that night, I received a call that changed everything.
A witness had come forward—a frail, elderly man who'd been searching for his son and daughter-in-law for over two years. They'd vanished without a trace. And the description he gave of his daughter-in-law matched the clothing found on the body in the suitcase.
His name was Sun. His missing son was named Sun Peng, and his missing daughter-in-law was named Guo Li—a pretty young woman whose face was now staring up at me from a missing persons flyer.
The case was beginning to crack open.