The Devil's Sleeping Beauty

"Why are you here?"

Xia Meilin was glaring at the woman who was sitting on the shotgun seat of the car.

"I'm on a month vacation so I decided to spend it here." Nian Jiezhen said with a smile on her lips.

Xia Meilin turned to Lu Yifeng with eyes asking for the truth.

"I'll tell you later." He patted her head gently as if he was trying to calm her down. "Su Lei, to Red Garden."

"Yes, sir." Su Lei started driving to the place where they will be having their dinner.

"To have a vacation for a month, aren't you usually busy?"

"Well, it's not a total vacation. I am assigned here to check on a case."

"A case?"

"Yes, Interpol is after an international serial killer. I am one of the special agents assigned here to help your law enforcement to investigate the case." Nian Jiezhen explained.

A sparkle appeared in Xia Meilin's eyes since what she said caught her attention. "How were you able to find out that the killer is in this country?"

"Because of that killer's signature."

"Signature?" Xia Meilin asked with a confused look on her face.

"Signature connotes artists signing their work with a triumphant flourish. The killer's signature, in contrast, is more like an imprint left behind, especially on botched incidents. It can be the result of psychological deviance, but some are just for effect. Some offenders have posed a corpse in a provocative s.e.x.u.a.l position, carved something on a body, inserted items, or taken a souvenir. It's thought that signatures originate with personality factors rather than arising from what's needed to complete a murder."

"Wow... I never knew that serial killers have those too... May I ask what's the killer's signature is?"

Nian Jiezhen didn't mind telling her some of the information she has since Lu Yifeng has already told her that Xia Meilin might play an important role in how to capture this criminal. "The unsub would always take couples and leave four stabbed wounds on their backs. Because of the depth of the stabs, we are sure that the unsub is a woman but she might not be working alone because those stabs are postmortem. She may have a partner who loves to torture the victims to death. Besides, she won't be able to abduct those couple by herself."

Xia Meilin turned to Lu Yifeng without saying a thing but Lu Yifeng was able to understand the way she looked at him that's why he nodded. There was a big possibility that Yong Biqi and Feng Huiqing was the culprit they were looking for.

"How many have they killed so far?" Xia Meilin couldn't help but ask Nian Jiezhen. To be able to catch the higher rank law enforcement's attention, then it should be something really big, right?

"As of now, we found ten bodies with the similar stabs on the back. At first, we weren't able to connect it because these bodies were found in different countries and different race. Two in Paris, two in Vietnam, two in Canada, four in this country. There might be more bodies since the first bodies that were reported was fifteen years ago."

Xia Meilin was just eleven years old back then so that means that the bodies they found weren't the first because from what she believed, her parents were the first victim. Yong Biqi was already forty-nine years old so if her calculations were correct, she killed Xia Meilin's parents when Yong Biqi was still around twenty-three.

Nian Jiezhen sighed heavily, "To be able to hide from the police for this long, she and her partner are pretty organized."

"Organized?" Xia Meilin furrowed her brows.

"Ah, don't get me wrong. There are two types of offenders, organized and disorganized. Organized killers are likely to be above-average intelligent, attractive, married or living with a domestic partner, employed, educated, skilled, orderly, cunning and controlled. They have some degree of social grace, may even be charming, and often talk and seduce their victims into being captured. They are very difficult to apprehend because they go to inordinate lengths to cover their tracks and often are forensically savvy, meaning they are familiar with police investigation methods."

Xia Meilin turned to Lu Yifeng, "I suddenly want to work with her. Zhenzhen's work is really cool." She smiled before she turned back to Nian Jiezhen, "Zhenzhen, tell me more about the different kind of cases you handled. What was your hardest case?"

Nian Jiezhen flinched a bit when Xia Meilin called her that way. Did she hear it right?