This was Ma Xiaowei's second time opening his mouth to accuse himself of killing someone in a Public Security Bureau. This ground-breaking teenager was wailing more powerfully than the victim's relation, nearly knocking his head against the floor. Two policemen next to him reacted, going over and pulling him up, drawing him away amidst Mother He's sorrowful cries.
Luo Wenzhou hadn't expected his casual introduction to precipitate such an event. His head swelled. He had a premonition that this would be a sleepless night. He had to quickly send his building's property manager a text message, imploring a serving of cat food for the starving and freezing Luo Yiguo.
Lang Qiao was about to lead Fei Du away to give a statement. Luo Wenzhou looked up and called him to a stop.
"Hey," said Luo Wenzhou, without appellation or inscription, "thank you."
Fei Du hadn't expected this person's dog mouth to sprout an elephant's tusk (33). He was rather taken aback. His steps paused. With the elegance of a president giving an inaugural speech, he very solemnly nodded. "You're welcome."
Luo Wenzhou appraisingly watched his model-like back out of the room, oddly reminded of a strutting poodle. He really wanted to chase after and put a walking stick in his hand. But after fighting for seven years, the two of them had only just seen the dawning light of a ceasefire, and Luo Wenzhou didn't want to go borrowing trouble. He therefore forced down all his marvelous ideas, turned and patted Xiao Haiyang on the shoulder. "Why don't you come with me."
Xiao Haiyang silently followed him to an individual interrogation room. Somewhat nervily pushing at his glasses, he looked directly at Luo Wenzhou. "I'm not here in the capacity of a police officer assisting with an investigation, am I?"
Luo Wenzhou gestured at Xiao Haiyang. "Please sit. Tell me, what capacity do you think you're here in?"
Xiao Haiyang didn't stand on ceremony. At his words, he sat down, very upright. "Am I a suspect or a witness?"
Luo Wenzhou laughed and according to habit crossed his legs and leaned back. The wound on his back immediately protested, shrieking towards his pain receptors, hurting so much he nearly . Luo Wenzhou forced himself to preserve his demeanor and awkwardly sat up properly, chattily asking, "How long have you been at work?"
"Two years…a year and half," said Xiao Haiyang.
"Oh, so you only finished your trial period recently, right?" Luo Wenzhou nodded, recalled for a moment, then continued, "When I was little, my dad originally wanted to have me test into the armed forces academy, but I was still going through my rebellious phase. Whatever he said, I did the opposite. I said, 'I'm not going to go study missiles in the Sahara,' then I ran back to school and submitted a bunch of forms. At the time I was very deeply impressed by Hong Kong gangster films and thought all policemen were like Tony Leung and Louis Koo, so I ended up in this line of work."
Xiao Haiyang very seriously responded, "The Sahara isn't in Chinese territory."
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
This young person really knew how to talk.
Xiao Haiyang may also have noticed something off about this response. His posture became a little more tense. "Please go on."
Luo Wenzhou felt that Xiao Haiyang perhaps didn't even know how to say "relax," so he abandoned his efforts on that score and became businesslike, coming right to the point. "Anyway, you're a fellow professional who's performed meritorious work. Whether you're a witness or a suspect remains to be seen based on the outcome of the investigation.—You've already mentally prepared for that, and you've also prepared to divulge everything you know, is that right?"
Xiao Haiyang nodded.
"Good," said Luo Wenzhou. "I'll start from what's right in front of us, then. Why did you bring Ma Xiaowei here tonight?"
"Because there were people who wanted to kill him to silence him," Xiao Haiyang answered without pretending to take time to think about it. As he spoke, he fished a phone out of his pocket. It was already very properly sealed in an evidence bag. He passed it to Luo Wenzhou. "I was on duty tonight with another colleague. This is his phone. When this message came, he was asleep."
Luo Wenzhou scanned the text message through the clear bag. It matched what Lang Qiao had said. He put it aside. "Why would you read someone else's texts?"
Xiao Haiyang said, "I've been keeping watch on him."
This young man's speech was very fast, he didn't smile much, and when he spoke to people, his body language was always tense. From time to time he made little gestures like pushing at his glasses or clenching his fist. He didn't seem like an "experienced" adult, but rather like a middle school boy at the stage of development where his limbs were uncoordinated.
Looking at him, Luo Wenzhou felt that if you split Fei Du's oiliness and gave Xiao Haiyang half, the two of them would be just about normal.
"And why were you keeping watch on him?"
Xiao Haiyang pursed his lips. "Can I start at the beginning?"
Luo Wenzhou nodded, and Xiao Haiyang took a deep breath, considered for a moment, then began as if giving a careful and detailed analysis: "Our atmosphere there isn't much like it is here at the City Bureau. When there isn't an important occasion or some major case, we normally don't see Director Wang. If he has any orders for us, they go through Captain Huang—oh, that's the Flower Market District Sub-Bureau's Criminal Investigation Team's leader. His full name is Huang Jinglian.
"Captain Huang's relationship with the deputy-captain isn't very good, but there are some colleagues in our department who are his confidants and 'protégés.' Sometimes there are things he'll just call his own people to handle, and other people won't know what they're up to. The deputy-captain has basically been undermined by him. He doesn't have any control.
"I'd always thought Captain Huang was picking out the best jobs for his favorites, which didn't bother me very much. Ever since I was little, those types of cliques haven't had anything to do with me. But then one day, one of the local police stations reported a case—they'd found a girl's body. It was just time for the night shift, and I should have been on duty. I was already prepared to set out, but a colleague stopped me… It was the owner of that phone. He said he had something to do at home the next day and asked if we could swap shifts. It's normal for us to privately swap shifts, so I didn't think much about it and agreed. In the end Captain Huang and that colleague went out to the scene."
"Huang Jinglian was there at the time?" Luo Wenzhou paused, then followed up, "What was the name of the girl who died?"
"Chen Yuan," said Xiao Haiyang.
Luo Wenzhou narrowed his eyes faintly. "Why do you remember it so clearly? Does Chen Yuan have some special meaning for you?"
"I remember most of what I see. I can still recite the license plate number of the police car you drove to the scene at the start of the '520' case, if you need…"
"…" Luo Wenzhou didn't know whether to laugh or cry. This Little Glasses' style simply didn't fit in at all with the Flower Market District Sub-Bureau's. He quickly waved his hand. "No need to recite it, I believe you. Go on."
Xiao Haiyang paused, then returned to the original topic. "There was actually something special about the victim. There was a photo of the body sent over. When she died, she was wearing an openwork blouse and a miniskirt, her face was thickly made-up—and the blouse was on backwards. There's a type of women's blouse that has the buttons on the back. If there's no collar, at first glance it's very easy to get the front and back mixed up. You only feel that the underarms and the neck aren't in the right place when you put it on. My first thought was that it was very possible someone had dressed her after she died. If that was true, then the case could involve a homicide. I particularly mentioned this point to my colleague when we changed shifts…"
Luo Wenzhou's fingers rapped lightly on the table. He didn't interrupt. He'd obtained the materials from Chen Yuan's case and clearly remembered that there had been nothing unusual about the clothing on the body. The blouse with the buttons on the back hadn't been on backwards.
"It was several days later when I found out the results of the investigation. Captain Huang and the others had determined that it was a case of a prostitute dying of a drug overdose. I went to ask that colleague for an explanation for the backwards blouse the victim was wearing. He hedged and just said I had seen wrong." At this point, Xiao Haiyang paused for a long moment. "I didn't save the photograph. I only looked at it quickly. It isn't as though I couldn't have seen wrong.—But that afternoon, a transfer of 2,000 yuan appeared on my salary card, and the text message note said it was a 'bonus'. Our wages aren't very high, everyone has families to feed, and their lives are stressful. When we get a bonus, there's sure to be a group celebration. The whole team's atmosphere is different. But this time, no one had mentioned it. Before I got off work, Captain Huang called me over and mentioned some routine work I'd done over the last few days. He said I was earnest and responsible, and he'd asked Director Wang to specially authorize the money to encourage an 'exemplar' who'd just started work. I thought this reason was very far-fetched and didn't touch that money, because I suspected it was 'hush money.'"
As soon as he heard this, Luo Wenzhou understood that this was in fact brazen hush money. "But you didn't have evidence. The concluding report for Chen Yuan's case was very clean. There were no weak points."
Xiao Haiyang's cheeks tightened, and he nodded rather unwillingly.
Luo Wenzhou let out a breath. "And then? That day at the crime scene, why did you hint to us that the place where we'd found the body wasn't the initial scene of the crime?"
"I thought Captain Huang and the others were up to something, so I thought it over and didn't disclose the matter of the bonus." Xiao Haiyang lifted his chin slightly, indicating the phone in the evidence bag next to Luo Wenzhou. "I looked for an opportunity to plant a virus on that colleague's phone, accessed his GPS, and kept track of his whereabouts every day."
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
Xiao Haiyang quickly explained, "I know that's against the law, but during training I barely scraped by on a lot of subjects. It wasn't realistic for me to try following them. I definitely would have been discovered at once. This was all I could do."
"No, I just didn't expect you to be so talented." Luo Wenzhou smiled. "What did you find?"
"After work he usually went to some entertainment centers. Besides that, every month on days that were multiples of five—the fifth, the tenth, the fifteenth, the twentieth, and so on—as long as he wasn't on duty, he would go to some fixed locations, including near the lot where He Zhongyi's body was found, and other fairly out-of-the-way places. I avoided him and the others and snuck over to investigate a couple of those places. I didn't turn anything up. But one time I pretend to be from out of town and asked for directions, and an old lady who lived nearby warned me not to go there after dark. She said there were sometimes 'people doing snow' there."
Luo Wenzhou said, "So what you're saying is, on the night of the twentieth, using the GPS, you determined that your colleague just happened to be at the place where He Zhongyi's body was found."
"After work, he left with Captain Huang and the others. I suspect Captain Huang and the others were also there then. The phone didn't show him leaving until almost eleven," said Xiao Haiyang. "Captain Luo, I think if we'd killed him ourselves, it would definitely be a bit more professional. It's not very likely that the body would have been so blatantly left there to cause such an irreparable uproar. Afterwards, Ma Xiaowei's appearance bore out my guesses—Captain Huang and the others had participated in certain business transactions at the scene that night, and in the process maybe there was some kind of quarrel that the neighbors overheard. Ma Xiaowei was there, too. And none of them saw how the body appeared there."
Luo Wenzhou listened, nodded, and made no comment. He only suddenly asked, "Where were you on the night of the twentieth?"
"I was on duty at the bureau, working the night shift. There's the duty log and the security camera footage." Xiao Haiyang's expression didn't flicker; he wasn't upset at all by Luo Wenzhou's blunt question. He very calmly and impressively said, "You suspect that I'm the one who dumped the body? I'm not. The West District's roads are complicated. If you want to dump a body there without anyone being the wiser, first you have to be very familiar with the surroundings, and then you have to have a means of transportation. I only recently got my driver's license, and I don't have a car yet."
Luo Wenzhou's expression was cool. It was unclear whether he believed this or not. Then he asked, "Now, have you…ever heard of the 'Golden Triangle Lot'?"
"Ma Xiaowei says, this so-called 'Golden Triangle Lot' is that very bit of ground where He Zhongyi's body was found. It's one of the places where they normally do business. Only people who regularly participate in the transactions know that name. It's strictly forbidden to share it." Tao Ran hurriedly left the interrogation room and tossed his notes onto a table. He said to Lang Qiao, "That bastard Luo Wenzhou, investigating something this big on his own without so much as a heads up. Does he think he's Captain America?"
Lang Qiao curiously asked, "So did Ma Xiaowei really kill He Zhongyi?"
"It doesn't seem like it to me. Ma Xiaowei says that after he got addicted, he was often strapped for cash. The people around him all knew about his problem and wouldn't leave money lying around the apartment. Ma Xiaowei set his eyes on He Zhongyi's new phone and snatched it for his own benefit. He was just about to go out to transact business when He Zhongyi got home from work and happened to think of the phone. He couldn't find it and questioned him. Ma Xiaowei is like a person possessed; he firmly denied everything. Finally, the two of them parted on bad terms.—Xiao Qiao, give me a bottle of water, I haven't had a break all evening." Tao Ran took the bottle of water, drank half of it in one go, then took a breath. "That night Ma Xiaowei exchanged He Zhongyi's phone for drugs and was very pleased with himself, thinking that when He Zhongyi got back and searched his things, there'd be nothing he could say. But the outcome was that He Zhongyi didn't come back, and just happened to die in that place."
"So Ma Xiaowei thinks that He Zhongyi somehow happened to see him selling the phone and got killed because he was trying to get his stuff back?" Lang Qiao's big eyes turned, and she quickly caught up. "Then afterwards, because of that fight among the common people, we got some unexpected testimony, and to cover up the truth, Director Wang planted that phone to frame him? So once and for all, who killed He Zhongyi?"
Tao Ran didn't answer; his phone was ringing. The call was from the Forensic Department's landline. He quickly picked it up. "Hello, how is it?"
The person on the line said something that Lang Qiao didn't hear clearly. She saw Tao Ran's face grow increasingly grave. Then he hung up the phone and asked her, "Has Fei Du left?"
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Author's Note:
(33) Common idiom meaning refined speech.