Iris 6

Qiu Zijia said, "We shouldn't stay here. What if the killer finishes off the female teacher and comes back?"

Mu Qin knew this was no place to linger. He held the corpse's arm and examined it for a long while. The body had already begun to turn cold. The man could not have been more thoroughly dead.

At last, Mu Qin was convinced that what had happened just now really had been a postmortem nerve response. He stood and said to Qiu Zijia and Cheng Guoxu, "The killer's footprints lead toward the courtyard behind us. While he's occupied with that female teacher, we'll search the Little Church."

At that moment, Cheng Guoxu spoke, unusually enough, his voice trembling faintly for some reason. "What about that woman?"

"To hell with her!" Qiu Zijia said anxiously. "We can barely save ourselves. Who has time to worry about someone else?"

Leaving someone to die was cruel, but Qiu Zijia looked like the kind of person who was utterly heartless in both word and deed, and Mu Qin was no saint himself.

During his service in the military, Mu Qin's instructor had trained him to stay calm, assess the situation, and act only afterward. Even if his closest companion were being tortured and murdered by the enemy right before his eyes, he was to wait coolly, weigh his own capabilities, and only then consider whether a rescue was possible. He could never lose his grasp of the situation in a moment of impulsiveness.

Mu Qin regarded that lesson as truth, and he had continued to live by it after leaving the military.

So, after a brief consideration, Mu Qin said, "The risk of saving Han Li is too great. We have no weapons, and aside from me, neither of you has any ability to fight. Besides... we can now plainly infer that the killer is Xu Fu. The three of us are all here. None of us has done anything extra. The last person who hasn't shown up is now dead, and Han Li has been taken away. So it can only be Xu Fu."

As he spoke, Mu Qin recalled, "Xu Fu has the best build among us. I'd estimate he's six foot two, about one hundred eighty-seven pounds. He may be carrying a short knife around twelve inches long, and his reflexes and strength are both excellent."

"Xu Fu used to be a murderer. He also has more experience than we do in this game. His mental fortitude definitely isn't weak; he won't be easily fooled by words or traps. We have no chance of beating him. Rushing in to save someone will only drag all of us down with her."

Mu Qin's analysis put a great deal of pressure on Qiu Zijia. Drawing in a cold breath, Qiu Zijia said, "I knew it was that murderer. You could tell he had a vicious face just by looking at him!"

Mu Qin said nothing. He still frowned, unable to shake the feeling that something was wrong.

If the killer really was Xu Fu, why had he deliberately split up from them at the start? Wouldn't it have been easier to strike if he had stayed with them all along? He could have pretended to help them look for the orphanage's front-door key, then killed them one by one once they were exhausted. He could also ensure that the exit key remained in his own hands, reducing every escapee's chances of success to the absolute minimum.

Mu Qin could not figure it out. He decided to set aside these complicated thoughts for the time being and adapt as events unfolded. Leading Qiu Zijia and Cheng Guoxu, he headed for the Little Church across from the apartment building.

The rain was gradually growing heavier. The blood left in the courtyard by the earlier victim was quickly washed away. This storm had come at a particularly bad time.

By the time they crossed the courtyard and reached the steps of the Little Church, Mu Qin and the others were soaked through. The orphanage was freezing; Mu Qin estimated the temperature outside was only in the fifties. They wore nothing but thin gray shirts and trousers, which offered no warmth at all, and the rainwater had lowered their body temperatures even further.

The cold made Qiu Zijia and Cheng Guoxu shiver without stop. Mu Qin was more resistant to it, after all. During his five years of service, he had trained outdoors in below-freezing temperatures wearing only thin clothes.

Still, after looking at Qiu Zijia and Cheng Guoxu shaking like sieves, Mu Qin said, "Get inside the church, quickly. We can't stay out in the rain any longer."

With that, they hurriedly pushed open the church door... the redwood door carved with a snake coiled around a cross and set with multicolored diamond-shaped panes of glass.

The door was enormous and heavy. Mu Qin was thankful it was not locked; with enough force, it could be pushed open slowly. But the trouble was that it made a tremendous noise as it moved. Though on this rainy night, with water splashing and roaring everywhere, any sound could easily be drowned out by the rain striking the ground.

Mu Qin opened the door only enough to leave a narrow gap for one person to pass through, then motioned for Qiu Zijia and the others to enter one at a time.

After entering the Little Church within the orphanage, Mu Qin and the others began looking around its interior.

It was only a small church, so the interior was cramped, but it had an obvious Western-style design: rows of long pews for worshippers to sit in, a small stage, and a huge crucifix of Jesus hanging on the wall behind it, with stained glass decorations nearby as well.

Hanging from the ceiling was an enormous, luxurious silver chandelier, the European sort made for candles. A sharp inverted triangular support structure stood at its center, surrounded by a ring of small candleholders that branched outward like leaves. Candles could be set on these holders. The chandelier could be raised and lowered on iron chains; clergy could lower it, arrange pure white candles in the holders, light them, and then hoist it back up.

Before electric lights were invented in Europe, this was basically the kind of candle lamp everyone used: a candle set on a simple holder, sometimes covered with a transparent shade to keep the wind from extinguishing the flame. More often, people did not even need a holder. Setting a candle directly on a table was enough.

Of course, that was how poor people lived. The extravagant, indulgent European nobility liked finely wrought, ornate candleholders made of pure silver, with candles placed atop them. They turned lighting implements into decorations. Then, deciding that lamps set only on tables did not make a room bright or luxurious enough, they made the holders bigger and hung them from the ceiling on iron chains. That was how the candle chandelier came to be.

In modern society, candle chandeliers mostly retain only the form of candles. In truth, they use bulbs shaped like flames, hung in homes simply because they look nice.

Yet Mu Qin discovered that the candle chandelier in this Little Church was an extremely traditional kind, one that could only hold actual candles. It was indeed exquisite to look at, but it was also far less convenient. Electric lights could be switched on at once in the dark; this traditional candle chandelier could not.

Fortunately, the church had other lights for illumination, such as wall lamps. Those were proper electric lights, but many of their bulbs appeared to be broken. After feeling around for the switch, Mu Qin could only manage to turn on two. The whole Little Church remained terribly dim.

"It's too dark." Qiu Zijia had wanted to search the Little Church properly, but the darkness hindered his exploration. After tripping for the third time on a warped floorboard, he said to Mu Qin, "Can't we find a flashlight first?"

Mu Qin did not answer. He walked onto the Little Church's stage. Deep-red curtains hung at either side, and behind them stood several cabinets used to store tools. They were mainly meant to hold Bibles, crosses, and other objects needed for prayer.

After the orphanage was abandoned, the contents of these damaged cabinets had mostly been cleared out. In one small cabinet, Mu Qin found only a Bible that appeared to have had half of it sliced away by a sharp weapon, its cover stained with black grime.

Using the dim light, Mu Qin casually flipped through this half of a Bible. It was in English, dense rows of letters filling his vision. Mu Qin could not understand much of it, so after turning two pages, he tossed it aside.

He continued searching the cabinets. In the last compartment, Mu Qin finally found what he needed: several slightly yellowed candles of uneven lengths, a used box of matches, and two candlesticks, all sitting in that final cabinet.

"Now we have light." Mu Qin took out a candlestick, chose a candle that looked usable, and lit it with a match.

When Mu Qin had seen the candle chandelier on the ceiling earlier, he had already thought that since the Little Church had such an antiquated thing, it would naturally have candles, matches, and the like to go with it.

Before long, the candle's small flame successfully lit the area around Mu Qin. He carried it to illuminate some of the darker parts of the Little Church.

The firelight in Mu Qin's hand soon drew Cheng Guoxu and Qiu Zijia over. After exchanging a few words, the two of them also found candles in the cabinets and lit them. With light sources in hand, the three began exploring the Little Church. Though it was small, it concealed no shortage of mysteries. First of all... they noticed that the church had a second floor.

The church did have a second floor, but the staircase leading to it had collapsed. For some unknown reason, only broken sections of the stairs remained, while rubble from the collapse was piled in the corner of the stairwell. To reach the second floor, Mu Qin would have to gather chairs and other objects into a pile and climb up, but that would take too much time and effort. After thinking it over, they gave up on the idea.

"Come look! There's a lot of blood here!" Qiu Zijia then discovered a row of badly damaged pews in the church. It looked as though someone had violently smashed them apart; the pews were in pieces, with boards and nails scattered across the floor. Qiu Zijia noticed a great deal of blood still on the boards.

Mu Qin went over and took a look. The blood was still fresh, though it had begun to congeal. Then he noticed that it trailed all the way to the church's front door. Realizing something, he said uneasily, "It looks like this is the primary crime scene."

Qiu Zijia immediately understood, saying in horror, "You mean the dead man we just saw was attacked here?"

"That should be it. He was attacked here, then fled through the door." Holding up his candlestick, Mu Qin walked to the Little Church's entrance. When they had come in earlier, it had been too dark around them for them to notice that the door was also smeared with blood.

"I have a bad feeling about this. Don't you think we should leave as soon as possible?" Seeing so much blood on the floor and the door, Qiu Zijia began shivering all over again despite himself.

Mu Qin said, "Don't rush. This is a good opportunity. While the killer won't be able to get here for a while, we should search this place thoroughly."

Qiu Zijia said, "But it probably won't take the killer long to finish off the female teacher. What if he comes back in a moment?"

"He may not know we're here." Mu Qin looked outside through the nearby glass window, then judged, "The storm is still raging outside. The sound and water from the rain will erase our traces. That will impair the killer's judgment and give us more time to search."