S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 6 Chapter 67

The Culinary Murderer 19  – Camouflage

---

Bai Yutang asked the two patrol officers to lead the way to the slaughterhouse.

At this time of day, the slaughterhouse was on its lunch break. The two patrol officers asked whom they were looking for.

Bai Yutang, however, said it's good to rest, it's time to rest.

The group arrived near the slaughterhouse and, from across the road, first observed the surroundings.

This slaughterhouse was fairly large. Fortunately, the patrol officers were quite familiar with the layout. They pointed out where the entrance and exit were, where pigs were usually slaughtered, where the meat was processed, where the cold storage was located, and where the meat was loaded for transport...

Bai Yutang had the SWAT team secure the entrance while he led a team inside.

Zhan Zhao leaned against the car with his hands in his pockets, waiting with the two patrol officers and casually chatting.

"When you say meat processing, how far do they go?" Zhan Zhao suddenly asked.

The two officers thought for a moment. "Mostly sold by cuts, I suppose."

"Do they have large industrial meat grinders or anything like that?"

"There's a factory building that makes sausages, I think..." The more they talked, the more uneasy the two officers became. Their eyes widened as they stared at Zhan Zhao, as if asking – What's going on?

Zhan Zhao had initially expected this might take some time, but unexpectedly, Luo Tian and Qin Ou soon came running out and waved at them.

Wen Xiaorou was standing at the main gate, looking intently at a battered hatchback parked in the yard.

Zhan Zhao approached with the two patrol officers. Seeing her staring at the car, he asked, "What is it?"

Wen Xiaorou replied, "Tyres are flat."

Zhan Zhao followed her gaze and saw that indeed, all four tyres were completely flat, leaving the car slumped onto the ground. The number plate matched the one Zhu Yi had recalled earlier, it should be the same broken car that had been in the landlord's courtyard.

Zhan Zhao frowned as he looked at the car for a while. "Don't tell me we're too late?"

Qin Ou nodded slightly at Zhan Zhao, signalling for him to go in and have a look.

Wen Xiaorou asked if they still needed to maintain the perimeter.

Qin Ou shook his head.

So Wen Xiaorou signalled to her team to stand down, then removed her tactical gear and went in with Zhan Zhao.

Ma Han was standing at the entrance of a large roller shutter door, with a few factory workers nearby, peering over curiously.

It really was break time. The morning work had already finished, only the transport section was still loading goods. A few workers had noticed something going on at the back and had come over to have a look, but had been stopped outside.

Ma Han asked them what the building behind was used for.

The workers all replied that it was the processing workshop, meat would be brought there for cutting. The workshop was connected to the cold storage and the mincing room. Some of the meat would be sent into the cold storage, while minced meat would be packaged or made into sausages, ready for cold chain transportation.

Zhan Zhao walked inside.

He saw Bai Yutang and Zhao Hu standing in front of the cold storage, while Luo Tian was examining two open suitcases next to the meat mincer.

Even someone as thick-skinned as Luo Tian was at that moment covering his nose and mouth with a frown, shaking his head at the two suitcases.

Bai Yutang beckoned to Zhan Zhao.

Zhan Zhao and Wen Xiaorou both ran over, while the two patrol officers headed towards the meat mincer where Luo Tian was, as they felt those two suitcases looked somewhat like the ones Zhu Yi had described that night.

Zhan Zhao and Wen Xiaorou reached the cold storage entrance and saw Bai Yutang tilt his head towards the inside of the cold room.

The two looked in and saw that the storage was filled with hanging pigs.

There were the typical pulley-and-rail hanging hooks found in slaughterhouses, pigs were hung on them to facilitate cutting and transportation.

But among the naked, lifeless pigs were two clothed human figures.

These two were completely covered in frost, one woman and one man.

The woman wore a black T-shirt and a pair of floral pants, looked about fifty, with a perm, she was the fake landlady auntie.

Behind her hung a man, or to be precise, a male corpse.

He was wearing a yellow and white striped shirt, olive green work pants, black sandals, and most strikingly, an Instant Noodle Alien headpiece.

Their entire bodies were bruised blue and purple, with a layer of frost covering their skin. Their deaths looked horrible.

Wen Xiaorou inspected the corpses, put on gloves, reached out to touch the joints of the deceased, and raised an eyebrow. "A real professional."

Bai Yutang nodded as well. The two had had most of their joints dislocated using a very professional technique, then were hung directly on the meat hooks used for pigs and simultaneously bled and frozen to death, unable to struggle. It was, by all accounts, a gruesome death.

"This kind of method, should be revenge killing, right?" Zhan Zhao asked.

"Doesn't seem like something one would do without a grudge," Wen Xiaorou agreed.

"It could also be to extract information," Bai Yutang thought it looked somewhat like torture or interrogation-induced injuries, especially as the landlady's ten fingers had all been broken.

Moreover, on the faces of both corpses, a blue 'meat quarantine passed' stamp had been imprinted. It felt as though whoever had dealt with the bodies wasn't just full of hatred, but had added a touch of mockery as well.

At that moment, a commotion broke out outside.

Zhan Zhao and the others turned to look and saw two patrol officers bolting out while covering their mouths, then retching loudly in the courtyard.

Wen Xiaorou walked out in confusion, noticed the two suitcases nearby, and stepped over to have a look. After one glance, she took two steps back. "Is it what I think it is?!"

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang also walked over to have a look.

Inside the two open suitcases were piles of minced meat, mixed in with things that clearly shouldn't have come from pigs, such as human hair, fingernails and the like...

Bai Yutang instructed Luo Tian to fetch Gongsun and Ma Xin, then turned to the two patrol officers at the door who were almost sick to their stomachs, "Don't throw up, it's not what you think. It's just a trick, like a cicada shedding its shell."

The two officers finally caught their breath. Whether it was from vomiting or being scared half to death, they turned to look at Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang with watery, pitiful eyes.

Zhan Zhao also waved at them, motioning for them to go identify the two people in the cold storage.

The two officers wiped their mouths, took the bottled water Zhao Hu handed them, rinsed their mouths and then asked, "We didn't eat any of that human meat, did we?"

Wen Xiaorou widened her eyes and stared at Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang – What sort of case are you investigating that's this intense?

Both of them shook their heads, indicating that it wasn't the case.

Just then, the two patrol officers returned from the cold storage with blank expressions. "Eh? Aren't those the missing fake landlord couple? They weren't chopped up into mince after all?"

Wen Xiaorou had been standing next to the suitcases, observing them. Upon hearing this, she waved her hand dismissively. "Impossible! If the two of them had been minced, how would just two suitcases be enough? Even their ashes would fill a suitcase each."

"Urgh..." The two patrol officers were about to throw up again.

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang hurriedly waved their hands at the two of them – Didn't we just say it wasn't?!

As they spoke, Luo Tian arrived with Gongsun and Ma Xin.

Ma Xin burst in and announced, "They're not human meat buns. We dug up bodies in that small courtyard, completely intact, skin and flesh and all!"

The two patrol officers were still dry heaving a little, but upon hearing that they hadn't eaten human meat buns, they suddenly felt as if they'd been given a second life – Thank goodness!

Gongsun went into the cold storage for a look, then came out and said, "Looks like the two of them suffered a fair bit of torture and died a horrible death.

Bai Yutang glanced at Zhan Zhao.

Zhan Zhao signalled for Gongsun and Ma Xin to examine the contents of the suitcases.

At that moment, the person in charge of the slaughterhouse arrived. When the boss saw SWAT officers still stationed at the factory entrance, he was terrified and rushed in to ask what was going on.

Hu Zi was even teasing him, asking, "Ai, Boss, apart from selling pork, do you sell any other kinds of meat?"

The boss looked blankly at Zhao Hu. "We sell beef too..."

"What about human meat?"

"Ha?!" The boss practically jumped, shaking his head like a rattle. "Don't talk nonsense! How could that be possible? All meat products go through inspection procedures, how could it possibly be human meat..."

As he spoke, he walked over to the suitcases. When he saw the contents, he gasped sharply. "Who? Who did such a heartless thing!"

Gongsun examined the meat in the suitcases and noticed a large amount of pooled water at the bottom. He said, "Both these suitcases had been kept in a freezer. The meat was frozen and then thawed."

After visually inspecting the meat quality again, Gongsun tentatively concluded, "It should be pork."

The boss squatted down for a closer look too. "Hind leg meat!"

"This is a clever trick," Gongsun said. "Mixing hair and fingernails, tissues that carry DNA, into ordinary meat, then feeding it all through a mincer, the machine would inevitably retain some tissue residue. When forensics search the mincer, they'll find the same DNA as the landlord couple's, and conclude that they were minced here. That way, the two of them could have slipped away... But it seems they didn't succeed."

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang had also pieced together a new line of reasoning by now.

This had been orchestrated by the landlord couple, a plan to shed their skins like a cicada, but they had been caught out by a hidden predator.

They had disguised themselves as the original landlords and lived here. Whatever they were up to in secret, they were clearly trying to evade someone who was pursuing them.

But due to a trending online video, Zhu Yi's uploaded vlog, their whereabouts had been unintentionally exposed, forcing them to come up with a way to escape.

Their plan was to use Zhu Yi to draw the police over, creating the illusion that they had been dismembered and minced. This way, their identities wouldn't be revealed and they could get away cleanly.

From the very start, the reason the landlord couple had chosen to rent the property out was likely because they had already considered using the tenant one day to stage their escape.

In other words, that night had actually been a performance put on by the landlord couple. They must have prepared the scene in advance, then found a way to frighten Zhu Yi into calling the police so they could flee.

Of course, there was a certain unpredictability in the process, Zhu Yi's reaction.

The details were hard to investigate, because the landlord couple's plan had not succeeded. They must have been found by someone, or some people, they were trying to escape from... first subjected to severe torture and interrogation about something, then, according to their original plan, "displayed" here.

"Gongsun went to check the landlord couple's bodies and found that the female landlord's hair showed signs of being cut roughly, probably by herself, and in a hurry..." He then removed the Instant Noodle Alien covering from the landlord's head.

Everyone suddenly understood why he had been wearing the head covering, because the landlord was bald.

The officers said the landlord wasn't bald before, but he often wore hats.

On the smooth back of his head, there was a tattoo of a ship's anchor.

"He put on the head covering to run because his hair must have been shaved already. He was probably afraid Zhu Yi would see and report it to the police, so he wore the head covering to hide it." Bai Yutang took a photo of the tattoo on the back of the head and asked Jiang Ping to check it out.

"Could he have been a sailor or something before?" Zhan Zhao found it strange. Since the landlord often wore hats, he should have many hats, so why would he wear a head covering? And where did that head covering come from? Didn't they say it was very trendy and hard to get? The landlord couple lived a quiet life, they didn't seem like people who would have such a fashionable item.

The person was dead, and the clues were mixed with truth and falsehood, so more investigation was still needed.

Gongsun said the forensic team had just mentioned that the scene was arranged very "professionally," with many misleading elements.

Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao were puzzled too, staring at the two horribly dead fake landlords – Who exactly are they?

"Eh?!"

At that moment, Ma Xin suddenly pulled out a label strip from the side of one of the suitcases. "It's the same brand of suitcase!"

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang looked over, frowning. "The M brand again?"

Ma Xin nodded and checked the numbers. They weren't consecutive with the previous ones, but weren’t far apart either.

"How strange..." Both Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang felt baffled. How come this type of suitcase was everywhere? These days, it was hard enough to find two identical pairs of slippers on the street, yet only two homicide cases had uncovered five identical suitcases?

‿︵‿︵ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ・❉・ ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ‿︵‿︵

Previous Chapter | TOC | Next Chapter

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: May 24, 2025 by Angel

Edited: August 22, 2025 by Soojin