S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 6 Chapter 32

The Card Murderer 32 – Mail and Bandage

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Bai Yutang truly couldn't figure out what kind of identity the bandaged woman might have... Since Zhan Zhao was asking him to guess, did that mean it was someone he knew? Or at least someone he was aware of? Based on what Pei Xiu and the others had said about having seen the bandaged woman when they were children, and factoring in that the mental hospital case had taken place at least twenty years ago, that would make the bandaged woman at least in her forties, right? Of all the women over forty they'd come across in this case...

Bai Yutang unconsciously turned his gaze to Auntie Liu, who was sitting by Liu Jing's hospital bed sobbing. He thought to himself, No way...

Fortunately, before Bai Yutang could voice his guess, Zhan Zhao gave him a clue. "Do you remember that urban legend we talked about the last time we passed through the tunnel?"

Zhan Zhao's words left Bai Yutang dumbfounded, and the direction of the story suddenly changed.

"The bandaged woman from the urban legend?" Bai Yutang asked.

"Wasn't the one in the tunnel a version set in a plastic surgery hospital?" Zhan Zhao's tone held a note of excitement.

Bai Yutang was puzzled. "Plastic surgery hospital version... you mean there are other versions?"

"Mhmm. Boss Tu mentioned a rehabilitation centre version." Zhan Zhao then asked where he was and why it had taken him so long just to get drinks.

Seeing Ma Han and Zhao Hu running over, Bai Yutang began recounting the incident where they'd run into the assassins who had attempted to murder Liu Jing and her family.

"Not just Liu Jing, they wanted to kill her whole family?" Zhan Zhao found that a bit strange too. "Why would they want to kill her parents as well?"

Bai Yutang said he wasn't sure yet, but they'd caught all four assassins, so they could question them properly once they got back...

After hanging up, Bai Yutang instructed Ma Han to assign more personnel to ensure the safety of Liu Jing and her family, then began walking back with Mia to rejoin Zhan Zhao.

"Four assassins, four guns..." The more Bai Yutang thought about it, the more wrong it felt.

When they reached the ground floor, Mia nudged the absent-minded Bai Yutang and pointed to the side.

Bai Yutang turned his head and saw Eleven by the vending machine, buying a bottle of water. He remembered that Eleven had gone to eat with Zhao Hu and Ma Han.

Mia waved at Eleven.

Eleven nodded at her, holding up the water.

Bai Yutang thought it would be a good opportunity to consult a "professional," he asked, "Are there any assassin groups that operate in teams of four?"

A look of disdain crossed Eleven's face. "It's not some idol group, four people working together? That's way too much hassle..."

"Really?" Bai Yutang asked.

"Even if there were four people, it's likely that two would be responsible for the operation and two for support. There's no way all four would enter the room and act at the same time." Eleven shook his head repeatedly. "Four people's enough to form a small squad and take down an armed stronghold."

Bai Yutang agreed – That's exactly what I was thinking too.

"Are you sure they were professionals?" Eleven asked curiously. "Couldn't they have been some kind of cosplay group?"

Mia stood to the side, shaking her head. She gestured to Eleven, indicating that those people had been trained, it wasn't the kind of body ordinary people had.

"Really..." Eleven stroked his chin. "Could it be that I'm out of touch, is everyone now doing coordinated actions?"

"So in your opinion, in what kind of situation would they act like this?" Bai Yutang asked Eleven seriously.

Eleven thought for a moment. "If it wasn't just a joke... then there might be something unusual going on here."

Bai Yutang waited for him to elaborate.

"One possibility is that they weren't all hired by the same person, maybe two separate clients, each hiring two killers. The assassins knew each other and decided to team up so they could get paid from both ends."

Bai Yutang nodded. That was certainly a plausible scenario.

"Another possibility is that there was a side mission," Eleven continued. "Some of them were there to carry out the killing, while the others were assigned a different task."

"Different task?" Bai Yutang was curious. "Like what?"

"There's lots of things," Eleven gave examples. "Such as disposing of the body, staging the crime scene, or looking for something, and things like that."

"If they were looking for something, wouldn't they go to the house, not the hospital..." Bai Yutang muttered to himself.

"You said earlier the assassins were trying to wipe out the whole family?"

"Yeah."

"Did the parents know some secret too?"

Bai Yutang shook his head. "Doesn't seem like they know anything. If they did, they'd probably have said something by now."

Eleven thought for a moment, then asked, "Could it be... the daughter had sent something before?"

Bai Yutang was slightly taken aback. "Sent something?"

With Eleven's reminder, Bai Yutang instantly recalled some fragmented images... Next to the café at the entrance of the campground, there is a mailbox.

Mailboxes weren't common these days, most people in the city used couriers. But in scenic spots and tourist areas, a few were still kept, mostly for sending postcards and the like. Mailing through a mailbox was generally slower than using a courier. If something had been sent at the time of the crime, it might not have arrived yet. There was a mailbox right in front of the café, and Liu Jing had sat inside the café for quite a while that day. On her family's fridge, there were lots of travel souvenir magnets and some postcards... and the notebook she usually carried still hadn't been found...

Bai Yutang pieced the clues together. It might not have been practical to send the whole notebook, but sending a few pages from it wasn't difficult. Could it be that the murderer had taken the notebook, found that several crucial pages were missing, and then thought of the mailbox too... and that was why they wanted to eliminate Liu Jing's whole family?

It wasn't entirely impossible. Bai Yutang immediately called Jiang Ping, asking him to help look into it, and also had Luo Tian take Bai Chi to the post office to check whether Liu Jing had mailed anything, perhaps to her own home or her parents.

......

Back outside Boss Tu's observation ward.

Zhan Zhao and Zhao Jue were still dutifully standing at the door, only able to listen in through the narrow gap in the window. Bai Ye was cold and curt, if he said not to enter, then they couldn't enter.

As for Boss Tu, whether it was because he liked Bai Ye's looks, or because Bai Ye had saved him and made him feel particularly secure... either way, once they were alone, the old man was surprisingly chatty, showing no sign of being shaken.

Zhan Zhao had been listening quite attentively when he became distracted by a constant click-click sound beside him that started getting on his nerves.

He turned to look and saw that Zhao Jue had somehow found a ballpoint pen, probably one a doctor had dropped. Zhao Jue was repeatedly clicking the pen cap, presumably for stress relief... Listening to it was driving Zhan Zhao up the wall. In the end, he couldn't take it anymore and snatched the pen away, setting it to the side.

......

Luckily, the conversation inside the ward was so bizarre that even Zhao Jue forgot to sulk and started listening seriously.

Bai Ye was asking Boss Tu who the woman with the bandaged face was.

Boss Tu lowered his voice and said, "She's not human."

"If she's not human, then what is she?" Bai Ye didn't understand.

"Aiya, this matter, is really..." Boss Tu sighed, placing a hand gently over his chest to calm himself down, then slowly began telling Bai Ye about an experience from long ago.

Although Tu Zi seemed timid and delicate now, his early life had been rather rough. Having lost both parents at a young age, he'd had to start fending for himself early on and ended up working at a small restaurant.

Once, in the alley behind the restaurant's kitchen, Tu Zi spotted a job posting that struck him as rather odd, it was strangely hidden away.

He went over to have a closer look and saw that it was from a rehabilitation centre under a psychiatric hospital, hiring a general assistant, and the pay looked quite decent.

Tu Zi tore the posting down and went to the centre for an interview the very next day.

Tu Zi said the interview had been quite strange. They didn't ask whether he had any experience in healthcare or in caring for psychiatric patients. Instead, they asked how many people were in his family and whether he had frequent contact with them, all sorts of seemingly irrelevant questions.

Tu Zi was alone, so he said there were none... and they told him to go home and wait to be notified.

At the time, Tu Zi thought he hadn't been selected and didn't think much of it... But when he went home, he received a call saying he'd been accepted and that he was to report to the rehabilitation centre the next day.

And just like that, Tu Zi started working there.

At first, he'd been a little uneasy, it all felt a bit too good to be true, like something dodgy might be going on.

But when he arrived, he found that the rehabilitation centre was very well built. The staff and patients all seemed serious, and the facilities were excellent, so he felt reassured to stay and work there.

Tu Zi's job mainly involved miscellaneous tasks, though he sometimes helped care for the patients.

The patients in this hospital are all very strange, but Tu Zi thought they were all particularly normal. These people come from all age groups, with a balanced mix of men and women, in short, very evenly distributed. They woke up and went to bed at set times every day, and there were scheduled times for meals and showers. The rest of the time, they participated in various "activities" and took their medication on time.

These activities resembled some kind of game... While participating in the activities, the patients had to wear bandages over their faces and draw cards or something of the sort...

Because all unrelated personnel had to stay well away whenever the patients were doing these "activities", Tu Zi never actually knew what went on.

After a month of working in this way, Tu Zi received his wages without issue, so he stayed and worked without any worries.

However, as time went on, Tu Zi began to notice something – Every month, a group of patients would leave. For example, if a female patient in her thirties left today, another woman of roughly the same age would arrive the next day... The number of patients and their general characteristics remained consistent. Some of the older ones stayed on, but each month there'd be a partial turnover.

Zhan Zhao and Zhao Jue both frowned as they listened – This was a textbook case of experimental replacement. Those so-called "patients" sounded far more like volunteers participating in some sort of medical experiment.

Aside from the constant turnover of people, Tu Zi had also noticed that the older patients... were becoming increasingly strange in temperament.

To put it simply, Tu Zi felt as if these people had started off perfectly sane, only to become ill as time went on... And more bizarrely, although they all looked completely different in their usual appearances, once they wrapped bandages around their faces, Tu Zi felt that every single one looked exactly the same.

After two months, the atmosphere at the rehabilitation centre grew more and more eerie.

Tu Zi began to truly feel that he was working in a psychiatric facility. The patients... started to worry him. Some of the old patients who used to greet him when they saw him no longer recognised him, and the way they looked at him made him feel afraid.

By the third month, Tu Zi was plagued by nightmares and began to consider whether he should change jobs.

One Saturday morning, during a bandage activity, a female patient drew some sort of card. The moment she saw the face on the card, she suddenly went crazy, screaming as she bolted out of the room.

All the doctors and nurses chased after her, and Tu Zi ran after her as well...

But the female patient had gone completely crazy, she was not only fast, but also aggressive.

She burst out of the hospital area, tore down the mountainside, and ran straight onto the highway.

Coincidentally, a car was passing by just then. The driver hadn't anticipated someone suddenly charging out from the mountainside. Though they slammed on the brakes, it was already too late... The vehicle struck the female patient.

The medical staff reached the bottom of the mountain, but she was already dead.

At that time, the driver got out of the car. Tu Zi pointed a trembling hand at the photo in Bai Ye's hand and stammered, "That's the woman."

Bai Ye frowned at the photo. "This is the woman who was driving the car?"

Tu Zi nodded mysteriously. "That's right. She was terrified at the time. Some of the staff carried away the corpse, while others took that woman into the rehabilitation centre. They even drove her car away."

"They took her inside? And then what happened?" Bai Ye pressed, still puzzled. Tu Zi had just said the woman in the photo wasn't human, yet now he was saying she was the driver who'd hit the patient... What exactly did he mean?

Tu Zi glanced around nervously, looking deeply anxious, then lowered his voice and whispered, "They kept her! She replaced that female patient!"

At the window, Zhao Jue was stunned into silence. He turned to Zhan Zhao, about to make a snarky comment, when he heard that familiar clicking sound nearby.

Zhao Jue looked over and found that this time, it was now Zhan Zhao's turn to click the pen.

Zhan Zhao looked excited, muttering under his breath, "It's the psychiatric hospital version of that urban legend!"

‿︵‿︵ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ・❉・ ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ‿︵‿︵

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Translator Notes

Please feel free to comment any mistakes I made so I can improve and do better as I go through the book.

Translated: April 23, 2025 by Angel

Edited: June 18, 2025 by Soojin