Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
“Do you believe a person can be tamed?”
I once conducted a forensic psychiatric evaluation on a young female inmate named Jade Mercer.
It was a case I never forgot.
It left me with a lasting suspicion of human nature, and a fear of it too.
For a long time afterward, I withdrew from the world almost completely.
In 2006, I was asked by the Forensic Evaluation Center to assess Jade Mercer, a female prisoner.
Before I met her, I had already built a rough picture from the police statements and the case files.
Jade’s life story was simple on the surface, and twisted underneath.
Her biological father was from South City. Her mother, originally from western Hubei, had been his high school classmate.
They fell in love and dropped out together. Her father opened a small tobacco-and-liquor shop.
Her mother was strikingly pretty, with a beautiful singing voice, and she appeared often on stages big and small.
Then the old district was redeveloped. Their family received a large compensation payout, along with several apartments in the city center.
By today’s standards, she would have counted as someone who never needed to worry about money.
But fate is rarely logical.
When Jade was three years old, she disappeared in a park and somehow ended up deep in the mountains of western Hubei.
For years, she lived half-starved, never knowing where the next meal would come from. Only when her adoptive mother died unexpectedly, when Jade was eighteen, did a volunteer teacher help her find her family again.
In those days, print media still mattered. Nearly everyone in South City learned her story from a human-interest piece in the evening paper titled “The Mountains Are So Vast, I’ll Never Walk My Way Out.” People pitied the poor girl. They ached for what she had suffered, and they were relieved that she had finally been reunited with her family.
No one expected that only six months later, she would once again seize the city’s attention.
Just like Jade Mercer’s fate, public opinion about her split cleanly in two.
People felt either pity or revulsion.
There was nothing in between.
On the Mid-Autumn Festival, a holiday meant for family reunions, her birth parents died under bizarre circumstances, and the tobacco-and-liquor shop went up in flames.
When the police followed the trail to the shack where she was hiding, everyone on the scene was badly shaken.
Everything about it was wrong. Too wrong. Too eerie.
The room was in complete disarray, the kind of chaos that made the skin crawl. Over it all hung the sweet, rotten stench of decay—like apricots gone overripe and split open in the heat.
And there was Jade Mercer.
She sat quietly in the very center of the room, as if she were on stage. A dot of lipstick had been pressed between her brows. Heavy rouge bloomed on both cheeks in two vivid, impossible circles.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2
She sat there so neatly, so obediently, on the sofa, wearing an expression of innocence so pure it became unsettling.
Above her hung the decomposing body of an adult man.
The police brought her in immediately for questioning and began identifying the dead man. He was confirmed to be Jade’s brother.
More precisely, Ruth Harlow’s biological son—the boy with Down syndrome whom Jade had cared for since childhood.
By that point, the case had already turned baffling and dense with contradictions.
What Jade had done, and why she had done it, made no sense on the surface. There had to be more underneath.
Then a female officer noticed how listless she seemed, and the small injuries scattered across her body.
Based on the shape and direction of the wounds, the medical examiner concluded that most of them were recent. A smaller number were older scars, thickened and raised, left behind by various past injuries.
At the same time, Jade would intermittently refuse to speak to anyone at all, while showing strong suicidal impulses and violent behavior.
Yet when she was lucid again, she often broke down sobbing. She called for her mother. She knelt in the corner facing the wall and confessed her sins as if begging for absolution from someone no one else could see.
The police therefore began to suspect severe schizophrenia. They believed the killing and the arson may have been carried out while she was not in control of herself—done in a dissociative, unconscious state.
That was why I was asked to step in.
My job was to determine whether she suffered from a definite mental illness, to assess what stage that illness had been in when she committed the acts, and how severe it had been.
From there, I would have to make a full forensic psychiatric evaluation—measuring the extent to which her judgment and self-control had been impaired, and reaching a conclusion on her criminal responsibility.
The first time I met Jade Mercer, she looked exactly the way I had imagined her: frail, watchful, all sharp edges and nerves.
Her fear seemed cinched tight by the silver handcuffs and leg irons on her body. Her small pointed chin was tucked into the bleached collar of her clothes. Through eyes clouded and webbed with red, she stole glances at me from across the table, like a white rabbit that had blundered into a trap—one last desperate struggle already spent, leaving only the ragged voice of something cornered.
“So you’re the doctor they sent to evaluate me.”
“Yes.” I kept my tone as even as I could. “My last name is Cross. You can call me Dr. Cross, or Julian.”
I wanted her to trust me, or at least to feel I was speaking to her as a person rather than a specimen.
Her face stayed blank, but there was revulsion in her voice, mixed with testing curiosity and a thread of panic. “Julian Cross. That’s a pretty name.”
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Her own name had been given to her by her adoptive mother after she was taken. On her ID, in the newspaper stories, the name Jade Mercer always stood out.
“Does it mean something?”
She was unusually sensitive to that question. She had pressed one of the detectives about it before, I’d been told, and after he answered, she had suddenly become so agitated she tried to wrench free of her restraints and attack him.
The bandages still wrapped around her wrists, and there were obvious bloodstains on them.
“My father was a police officer,” I said. “He was killed in an arrest operation before I was born. My mother named me after him.”
I answered plainly. I also noticed the change in Jade’s expression. Something in her loosened. She lowered her head slightly and studied my blurred reflection in the shine of the tabletop. Her narrowed eyes drifted out of focus for a moment. Then, as if forgetting I was there and remembering at the same time, she began to hum.
“Let us swing our oars,
and push the little boat through the waves.
The white tower shimmers on the water,
green banks and red walls all around…”
A stiff smile hung on her lips as she sang badly and off-key, treating me like the most faithful audience she had ever had.
One of the veteran detectives who had questioned her had described her this way: “Everything about Jade Mercer—her expressions, her behavior—feels wrong for a seventeen-year-old girl. She’s more like a grade-school child who hasn’t formed a complete moral sense yet. Under that innocent face, there’s a kind of cruelty that doesn’t understand the world, and doesn’t care to.”
“That’s a beautiful song,” I said.
My words made her look almost shy.
“Did a teacher teach it to you?”
In her disordered state, Jade often hummed that song. It had to mean something.
She caught the intention beneath my question at once. Leaning forward a little, she asked instead, “Dr. Cross, what kind of punishment will I get? Mom used to say that sooner or later they’d drag me out to face a firing squad. What’s that like?”
Her eyes were wide and guileless.
“I’m a doctor,” I said. “I can only assess your criminal responsibility.”
She was intelligent. And cunning.
The moment I used a firmer tone and pierced that childish mask, she gave a soft, contemptuous sound, clenched both fists, and slammed them down hard. Her face twisted. She shrieked, “I killed them! I killed all of them! I’m guilty—I really am guilty!”
The swing in emotion was so sudden and violent that the wounds at her wrists split open again. They had to take her away to have them treated.
It left me deeply unsettled.