Lei Mi - Profiler

After a long time, Du Yu cleared his throat and asked hoarsely, "You find him?"

Fang Mu slowly shook his head and said, "Don't pull any more of this crap."

Du Yu sunk once more into silence. A moment later he began to suddenly wail. He buried his head between his knees and tore at his hair. The veins on his hands were all sticking out, as were several wounds that hadn't yet healed. He continued his mournful cry, his voice rising until it was almost a scream, sounding like something being broken apart.

Fang Mu stood and walked over and put one hand on Du Yu's shoulder.

Do you remember how you once put your hand on my shoulder like this?

But Du Yu swung his arm and pushed Fang Mu's hand off him. "Get away!"

Du Yu cried for 10 minutes straight. At last he stopped as suddenly as he had begun.

After grabbing Fang Mu's tissues, he tore off a few pieces and wiped his eyes. He loudly blew his nose and threw the tissues on the floor. He climbed to his feet and walked to the door.

He turned around and said quietly, "When you find him, tell me first." He paused. "If you're still alive, that is." Then he opened the door and walked out.

Fang Mu remained sitting on the bed with his head down until the sound of Du Yu's steps disappeared at the other end of the corridor. He looked up at his closed door. "…Okay."

The room was silent again, as if the visitor from a moment ago had never even been there. Suddenly the room began to feel a little stuffy, so Fang Mu stood up and opened the window a crack.

A strong, snowy wind immediately burst inside, blowing the papers on the desk into the air, where they spun for a moment and then floated to the floor all across the room.

He quickly slammed the window shut as snow rapped against the glass, the flakes seemingly very proud of this surprise attack.

All of the documents that had been on Fang Mu's desk were now scattered about — on the bed, on the floor, all over the place.

After picking them up one by one, Fang Mu discovered he was missing a page. When he looked again, he found that it had floated under the bed.

Crouching down, Fang Mu reached as far as he could under the bed, but he still couldn't grab it.

He looked around the room, but there was no long stick or anything he could use to pull it out. Sighing, he crawled under the bed.

The space underneath was not covered with dust as he had imagined. Instead, as he felt around, he found that there was only a thin layer of the stuff.

His breath caught in his throat at the realization. After pulling out the piece of paper, he grabbed his lighter from the desk and crawled back under the bed.

As the flame burst from the tip of the lighter, the narrow space beneath the bed was illuminated. Moving the light about, he discovered that while there was a thick layer of dust beneath the corners of the bed, the area underneath its middle was quite clean, as if someone had made a point of sweeping it.

Fang Mu looked closely at the clean portion of the floor. He slowly rolled over and lay on his back.

As he held the lighter up to the underside of the bed, shadows fell across several places where the surface appeared uneven.

Fang Mu's eyes suddenly went wide.

All across the bed board a single name had been carved over and over again: Meng Fanzhe.

Some of the characters were written almost neatly, as if they had been carved with a knife. Others were very rough, as if they had been scratched out with a key or something similar.

From the look of things, Meng Fanzhe had not done them all at once.

He twisted about under the bed, shifting his position. Soon he discovered that under the head and foot of the bed Meng Fanzhe's name was written as well.

Fang Mu suddenly realized that during the final days when Meng Fanzhe had lived alone in the room, he had probably crawled under the bed like he was doing now and, trembling, had carved his name into the bed board over and over again.

After lying there for some time, Fang Mu crawled out from under the bed, shaken. Now dust-covered, he sat in the chair and zoned out.

After a few moments of internal debate, he suddenly leapt up and ran to the door.

Throwing it open, he burst into the hallway and looked at the number on the door.

As expected, between the 3, the 0, and the 4, he saw two faint marks. From the look of them, they appeared to be "+" signs.

Someone had made a point of erasing these two marks, but for some reason they hadn't been completely removed. Still, if one didn't look closely, the marks could easily be overlooked.

Just as he had thought. Someone had been controlling Meng Fanzhe.

Seven hours later, Fang Mu and Tai Wei were sitting together in the room.

Tai Wei washed his hands in the washbasin and patted the dust off his body.

"Hypnotized?" he said.

"Yes, I think that's a definite possibility."

"Are you saying that everything Meng Fanzhe did that night was the result of hypnosis? Including writing the plus signs between the three-one-three on your door, and then trying to kill you? Can it really be that powerful?"

"A person can be hypnotized into doing various simple things, but getting them to kill one person in particular is probably outside the realm of possibility." Seeing the puzzled look on Tai Wei's face, Fang Mu clarified: "Meng Fanzhe did not intentionally write the plus signs on my door, nor was his attempt to kill me premeditated. Do you remember how he paused briefly while he was following me that night?"

Frowning, Tai Wei thought back. "Yeah, I do remember something like that happening. He stopped for a little while when he was in the hallway. And you know what? I think it was right outside the door to this room."

"That's right. Now take a look at this."

After leading Tai Wei out into the hallway, Fang Mu pointed at the light marks on his door number.

Tai Wei stared at them, dumbstruck. "My God," he mumbled to himself. "At the time we just looked at your room number. We didn't pay any attention to this one."

"This shows that Meng Fanzhe did not purposefully choose me for his target. Instead, he was merely instructed to search the hallway for the number seven." Fang Mu pointed down either end of the hall. "Right here we have rooms three-hundred-one to three-twenty. Three-twenty-one is the bathroom and three-twenty-two and up are all in a separate section behind a locked door, so he couldn't get to them. Therefore, the only room numbers that could form seven were three-hundred-four and three-thirteen."

"So when he tried to kill you, was that also a result of the hypnosis?"

"At first I was really puzzled by this, too, because like I said, hypnotizing someone into killing a target should be just about impossible. Then I saw the names carved under the bed."

Tai Wei frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just wait a minute; first I'm going to give you a simple explanation of what hypnosis is, " Fang Mu decided. "Hypnosis is mainly about causing neurological, biological, and physiological changes through psychological suggestion. For example, hypnosis can be used to cure anxiety and depression and eliminate phobias. It is an extremely complex process and often requires that the hypnotist use various kinds of suggestive signals to help his subject enter a hypnotized state."

"Oh, this stuff I already know," Tai Wei said. "There's a Japanese movie called Hypnosis in which the suggestive signal was something like the sound of metal striking metal."

"Right. Now there's also something called post-hypnotic suggestion. This is when the hypnotist provides his subject with a signal that can still cause him to react even when he is no longer hypnotized. For this post-hypnotic suggestion to remain effective, the subject must have a tremendous amount of trust in his hypnotist and must subconsciously recognize the authority of this signal. From what I know, Meng Fanzhe was someone with a vulnerable psyche, making it very easy for him to become psychologically dependent on other people. In other words, he was an ideal candidate for post-hypnotic suggestion. From that night on, I always suspected that Meng Fanzhe had received this sort of post-hypnotic suggestion therapy, but I could never figure out what the signal was. That was, until I discovered the names."