Lei Mi - Profiler

"Go!" yelled Du Yu, his voice rising in volume.

Seeming not to hear him, Fang Mu patiently organized his things. When he couldn't find the cap to a pen, he began carefully looking for it in a pile of clothing.

"Get out of here," said Du Yu, his voice a little quieter, but still ice-cold. "None of us want to die!"

Fang Mu stopped what he was doing, stood up and turned around. He felt Du Yu and everyone else's eyes boring into his face.

He looked at them one by one. As soon as they met his eyes, almost everyone quickly looked own. Only Du Yu glared firmly back at him.

Fang Mu looked into Du Yu's eyes for several seconds. He slowly said: "I won't leave until I've caught him."

Then he grabbed his blanket and clothes and walked down to Meng Fanzhe's already locked room. With the creak of wood, he swiftly kicked it open. He tossed his things inside, went back to the hallway, collected more, and did the same.

No one stopped him. No one helped him. As everyone else just stood there and watched, Fang Mu picked up the last of his belongings. He walked inside the room that once belonged to Meng Fanzhe and slammed the door shut.

After standing empty for several days, Room 304 finally had a new resident. Fang Mu took the left side of the room, making the bed and placing his things on the left desk and in the left cupboard. Only once everything was neatly put away did he realize that the left bed had been Meng Fanzhe's. For an instant he considered moving his things to the other side of the room, but then he took off his shoes, lay down on the bed, and that was it.

Fang Mu sized up his new lair. No one had lived there after Meng Fanzhe died, so everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. The walls were badly watermarked, as if someone had splashed them with cups of liquid. In short, the place looked awful.

Fang Mu thought and looked around, looked around and thought. After not sleeping for a whole night, his eyelids began to feel heavier and heavier, until sleep won out.

When he awoke it was already night. Even though his stomach was growling from hunger, Fang Mu had no desire to get up. The lights from the dormitory across the way shined into his dark room, sending shadows across the walls that moved faintly.

Feeling a little cold, Fang Mu involuntarily curled up under the covers. By force of habit, he glanced at the other bed across the room, but now there was only a thin straw mattress.

So this is how cold it is, sleeping alone in a dorm room.

Compared to Room 313, which had always been packed full of his and Du Yu's stuff, Room 304 seemed terribly spacious.

So spacious, in fact, that it made him nervous.

Suddenly Fang Mu wondered whether, during Meng Fanzhe's final days alone in this room, he had also laid here in the dark, silently savoring the feeling of solitude.

Until he truly lost his mind.

Will I go mad, too?

Fang Mu hopped out of bed and looked at the dim lights from the distant dormitory. Seeing them, he felt a little better, a little less alone.

First , he told himself, you need to get something to eat .

But no matter what, he was not going back to the dining hall. He reached out and turned on the light and then grabbed a pack of instant noodles. He shook his kettle. Luckily, Du Yu hadn't broken it. It was empty.

Holding the kettle, he stood in front of his door for several seconds. Then, with what seemed a great deal of determination, he opened it and walked out.

Something fluttered to his feet. Fang Mu picked it up. It was an envelope with a letter inside.

He looked down either end of the hallway. It was very quiet. No one was there.

Fang Mu sat down on his bed and took the letter out of the envelope. It was from Deng Linyue; he recognized her handwriting.

My Dearest Fang Mu,

Please allow me to call you this one final time, and please believe that as I do so, I love you. Perhaps this love will gradually disappear with the passage of time, but at the very least, I firmly believe that at the moment in which I write these words, I do still love you.

By the time you read this letter, I will probably already be on my way home. Don't try to find me (although perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part; you would probably never consider looking for me if I left). I will not be returning to school for some time; I have entrusted my family with handling the necessary procedures to apply for time off.

Perhaps you will despise me. Despise me for leaving without saying goodbye, despise me for my weakness and my cowardice. I am just an ordinary girl, longing to be protected, yearning for a peaceful and romantic life. The instant you rescued me in the gymnasium, I fell in love with you. Just as when a princess is rescued by a prince, I had no choice but to fall in love with you.

And yet I know that you are not my prince. And I am neither as brave nor as strong as I imagined.

Yesterday morning, I saw everything that happened at the pool with my own eyes. When you finally revealed that the killer was after you, my first reaction was fear. I didn't even have the courage to go hug and comfort you; instead I fled back to my dorm by myself. Yes, I was scared, more scared even than that night in the gymnasium. The killer had already murdered your best friend's girlfriend, and I was probably next. Waiting for death is more frightening than death itself — at last I understood what this saying meant.

Why does he want to kill you? Why did he have to kill so many other people? I know you will not be willing to answer these questions, but that is all right. At this point, the answers are no longer important to me. Although I once believed that I was brave enough to stand by you through every trial, when I was truly confronted by the possibility of death, I chose to do the same thing that any normal girl would do.

Forgive me, forgive me for being an ordinary girl who once thought she was something more. Perhaps you never did love me; now I truly hope that is so. Because if it is, then for both you and I, this will be a little easier to bear.

I will pray for you.

Deng Linyue

12/25/2002

Although the letter was short, Fang Mu was still reading it over half an hour later.

His mind and heart were at ease.

He tried to tell himself: She has left you. You should be filled with sadness.

And yet, feeling a chill unlike any he had ever experienced, he couldn't keep from laughing aloud.

Good, very good.

At last, you are alone again.

Though perhaps, you have always been alone.

The victim was a 23-year-old girl from the city of Kaifeng in Henan province. She had been an English language grad student in the Jiangbin City University Foreign Language Department's class of 2003. The cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation, the murder weapon likely a hemp rope. The victim's hymen had already been broken prior to the night of her murder and there was no sign of rape. According to the autopsy and the testimony of the victim's friends, her time of death was determined to have been between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. on December 25. After the victim was strangled to death, heavy makeup was applied to her face, and then her body was placed in the JiangbinCityUniversity outdoor pool and her ankle was tied to the drain with a hemp rope. The pool was then filled with water.

According to an examination of the scene, the killer used a hammer-like tool to smash the lock on the pool gate so he could transport the body inside. No fingerprints or footprints were found at the scene.

According to the victim's schoolmates and boyfriend, the yellow tube top, short leather skirt, black platforms, and blonde wig that she was wearing when discovered did not belong to her. Her original clothes were not found at the scene.