The assistant's expression looked like she had something to say but was holding back. Fei Du only glanced at her and knew what she wanted to say. Very understandingly, he said, "If there are documents that need my signature, leave them on my desk. If any of them are urgent, I'll come back to the office in the evening."
"There are also some letters from business partners that may need your personal attention," the assistant added quickly. "What time would it be suitable for me to come pick you up in the evening?"
"No time would be suitable." Fei Du, opening the car door, laughed at her words. "I'll call a car for myself. If I delay your date with your boyfriend after work, you may not like me anymore. What will I do then?"
The assistant very generously said, "That boyfriend of mine, he has no money and no looks. I don't know what I keep him around for myself. Just give the order and I'll kick him to the curb at once."
"Take pity on the poor man kneeling at your feet. Also, your makeup is so lovely today. How can you only show it to me and the computer? It's a reckless waste of the bounty of nature." Without consulting anyone, Fei Du got out of the car. Before leaving, he put a hand on the car door and leaned down to exhort her. "This car can be a little tricky. Drive slower on the way back. Send me a message when you get back to the office."
At his words, the assistant subconsciously checked her makeup in the rearview mirror, found that her lip color had faded, and, when Fei Du had left, hastily went over it with her lipstick a few times. Then she couldn't resist raising her head to look at Fei Du.
Fei Du's back often had a distinctive swagger. Seen from behind, his arm, hoisted up because of its cast, hardly looked any different from his usual posture holding a glass of champagne; looking like he was attending a dinner party, he made his leisurely, carefree way to the City Bureau.
The assistant was surnamed Miao. Unlike the "palace steward" secretaries specially assigned to trifles, she'd had a solemn education at an elite school and was an excellent worker. Because she'd once run afoul of a nasty individual, her hopes in the workplace had been soured; Fei Du had given her a hand.
Young President Fei was a famous "ladies' man," casually teasing any young lady he met, seeming familiar with everyone; but in fact only those under his personal direction knew what he did every day.
Fei Du always worked by the book. He rarely rejected the senior management team's proposals, understanding very well the sense of letting experts handle business that required expert knowledge; while in some other matters, the qualities of a son of wealth were unusually apparent. Perhaps because he had been spoiled by growing up amidst luxury, he couldn't work up any greed in his bones; he gave up whatever immaterial benefits he could, making his relations with the small shareholders very harmonious. He was more than up to the task of socializing. He was a successor who caused no trouble to anyone…except that Assistant Miao had seen with her own eyes how he'd snatched up control over the conglomerate back then.
But the strange thing was, as far as Assistant Miao could see, their "son of the house" didn't have the disposition of a pioneering leader; he had no wild ambitions of stepping on Asia-Pacific and dominating the whole globe. As long as he had money when he wanted to spend money, he seemed to have no other views.
The strong momentum at the start of his succession seemed to have been just for the sake of making his presence felt and showing others not to try to fool him. After becoming thoroughly acquainted with all the conglomerate's workings, he hadn't put his hand in too much; this last half year he'd been especially scarce, disappearing more and more often without anyone knowing what he was doing, seeming intent on being a hands-off leader.
It sounded like a young person who lacked focus and hadn't decided yet what he wanted to pursue.
But Assistant Miao thought that Fei Du's mind was very deep; he wouldn't have this type of "blowing hot and cold," "starting fine and ending poorly" style. Thinking it over without being able to reach an answer, she looked towards the City Bureau, feeling that the public security bureau's gates were bustling. Then, weighed down, she drove away.
The gates of Yan City's City Bureau truly were exceedingly bustling. Every place, whether legal or illegal, was parked full of cars. A little traffic cop held up a parking ticket, not knowing whether it would or wouldn't be proper to stick it on, looking blankly all around.
Several officers on duty had been sent to the reception room to take responsibility for signing people in. There were so many callers it would soon surpass the utter confusion of a lowly local police station.
Fei Du followed a crowd of people just heading in. Without saying a word, he somehow mixed in with them.
Looking on, he found that the span of ages and positions among the people who had come was great. They came from all walks of life, wearing all kinds of clothing. There were grave-faced middle-aged people, as well as old people with their faces rimed by hardship.
Some people carried photographs with them; some seemed to be husband and wife—they seemed to stick closer together than ordinary husbands and wives, frequently holding hands or walking right next to each other, as if neither could easily walk alone, and they had to support each other in order to keep staggering on ahead.
A sudden uncontrollable sob would explode from time to time among the crowd; at these times, the dispirited expressions of the surrounding people would alter. But while they altered, aside from Fei Du, who was a curious outsider, most of the others wouldn't turn their heads to search for the source of the crying, as if they all had a tacit mutual understanding.
Fei Du frowned, faintly sensing something.
He had reported time and again to the City Bureau and was already very familiar with it. While no one was watching him, he simply strolled into the corridors. He was considering whether to call when he bumped into Luo Wenzhou at the door of a corner restroom.
Luo Wenzhou's already distinct eyelids had acquired another crease from staying up all night. He smelled chokingly of cigarette smoke. He had just washed his face with cold water, and the water droplets covering his head and face were rolling down his neck; there was a wet patch on the front of his t-shirt, leaving an unobstructed view. Fei Du's gaze unobtrusively travelled up and down between his chest and waistline; if his naked eyes could have acted as cameras, presumably he'd have taken a dozen close-ups in that moment.
When he'd seen enough, Fei Du pushed up his sunglasses, and, like a proper gentleman, made his opening remarks. "What, do the ones you dug up yesterday for the West Ridge case have a record?"
In matters of major crimes, no one's reactions were faster than Fei's. Luo Wenzhou didn't have any strength to be surprised. He nodded very wearily.
"What a large scale." Hands behind his back, Fei Du looked out the window and said, "On such occasions, the ones that come are usually the father and mother. I see there's quite a range of ages among these parents. How many years back are you digging?"
"Twenty-two years." When he spoke, Luo Wenzhou felt his voice was rather hoarse; he cleared his throat. "Guo Fei was taken from Lotus Mountain twenty years ago, but the same kind of victim in the same kind of case appears two years before. From Wu Guangchuan's death to the present, it hasn't stopped."
Fei Du got a package of breath mints out of his pocket and passed it to him.
"Our initial conjecture is that it's a gang." Luo Wenzhou sighed. "Each year there's a myriad of missing children, who go missing in all kinds of ways, and most of them aren't found. We can only rely on gathering blood samples and DNA, then trying our luck when suspicious child beggars are reported or we arrest a human trafficking gang. There's not a trace of these kids, dead or alive. It's hard to delimit the circumstances. Generally, the frontline officers are responsible for putting the investigation on record, and by the time it gets to us here, it's only an end-of-the-year report coming up from below. We only look to see that the data is within normal bounds. No one would take too much notice."
"But the old criminal policemen who worked the Lotus Mountain case must still have been in office these past few years? If there had been one or two among them who couldn't let go of the case, like your shifu, they would have discovered a problem long ago—unless these later cases were missing a crucial detail." Fei Du's response was so quick it was a little scary. "It's the follow-up tormenting of the parents, right?"
Luo Wenzhou didn't speak. He crushed a breath mint between his teeth.
"Supposing there is such a gang, using harmless little girls to approach their targets, carrying these girls off with no one the wiser, I think they wouldn't be willing to attract people's attention," said Fei Du. "The conduct of making harassing phone calls to the victims' homes is too 'personal.' It's not in the interests of the 'organization.' What the 'organization' wants is little girls around ten years old, but what the caller wants is to torment the girls' parents. It sounds like the 'bait' getting out of control."
Su Xiaolan twenty years back, Su Luozhan twenty years later.
Why does everyone have things, and I'm the only one who doesn't? Parents, a home, all the things I don't have, I'll destroy them all.
The call Guo Heng had received had come from a waste transfer station in the middle of nowhere; the only road that led there had a toll station. After repeated investigation, it was obvious that the person who'd made the call hadn't gone through the toll station, but had detoured by the national road, suddenly stopped the car by the side of the road, then climbed down a large slope carrying the kidnapped Guo Fei to make a phone call.
This business had a good deal of illogical points to it. It was a far-fetched guess Guo Heng had come up with after eliminating the impossible, so the police investigating the Lotus Mountain case at the time hadn't accepted it.
The girl on the phone hadn't spoken, only screamed. The sound of the bells in the pencil box had made Guo Fei's family think as a matter of course that the screams had belonged to Guo Fei, but…what if the girl on the phone hadn't been Guo Fei at all?
If Guo Fei had already been murdered then, and the killer, taking along his diminutive accomplice, had driven into the middle of nowhere to find a place to dispose of the body, and during this time, the girl had suddenly been unable to endure the pressure in her heart and had burst out, running out of the killer's car.
Luo Wenzhou gently closed his eyes, imagining what had been in the twisted little accomplice's heart then… Fear? Disgust? Disbelief? Or had she been filled with twisted jealousy and hatred?
He found it was beyond his capacity to imagine.
He was like many people who'd grown up in a peaceful age. If you asked them out of nowhere to imagine what they would do if the flames of war suddenly burned up to their doors, what would come into the minds of the vast majority of them would be "collect my jewelry and valuables," "think of how to get to my friends and family," "think of how to maintain the necessities of life as I flee from calamity," and other such "wilderness survival challenge"-like plans.
As an adult of ordinary intelligence, though Luo Wenzhou had countless times deduced all kinds of criminal motives, he could only use some terms floating around on paper to conjecture at the girl's state of mind then.
Why hadn't the same thing happened in the last twenty years?
In the end, what was the link between the deformed mother-daughter pair of Su Xiaolan then and Su Luozhan now?
"Can you sneakily get me in to talk to Su Luozhan?" asked Fei Du.
Luo Wenzhou came back to himself and thought, Isn't that nonsense?
He was planning to flatly refuse, looked up, and saw Fei Du leaning on the wall of the corridor opposite him, eyes lightly focused on him. He very rarely noticed Fei Du's eyes, because among adults, unless they were planning to fight or date, they wouldn't constantly be looking into each other's eyes; and in his impressions, all the looks Fei Du gave him were mocking, cold, satirical…each raised eyelash shouting in chorus, "Looking at you is displeasing."
Never before had his look been this peaceful and harmless; accompanied by that "sneakily" Fei Du had just spoken, Luo Wenzhou imagined he tasted a trace of softness. He went still, the "Bullshit! What are you joking about?" he'd been about to blurt out not leaving his mouth.
Such is the inherent weakness of a man!
Luo Wenzhou internally lamented, but his tone involuntarily softened a great deal. "I'm afraid that won't work. It's against regulations."
"Didn't you let me listen in on an interrogation last time?"
"Our leader specially authorized it."
"Then have him authorize it again. I've already talked directly to Su Luozhan, anyway." Fei Du displayed his habitual, somewhat irreverent not-quite-smile. "And moreover I've written a little article concerning studies of 'victims,' which fortunately happened to be read by a certain teacher some little time ago and collected in the third edition of an academic text on a related topic. Oh, on that note, this April I was enrolled into Yan Security Uni's applied psychology post-graduate program. Come September, I'll be halfway to being an insider in your system.—Captain Luo, how about you call and ask that very quick and able leader from last time?"
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
When the fuck had all this happened!