Xu Wenchao couldn't quite seem to catch his breath. He didn't even have time to consider how the police had found that apartment. He didn't have time to decide whether he'd left any traces behind in that car. At the moment he heard the address, he knew he was done for.
The roaring in his ears stretched out for half a minute. He sat there still as a carved idol, putting the policemen facing him, the eagerly watching security camera, and the cramped little dark room all at the back of his mind, drowning in his own world.
Xu Wenchao had received a high-level education. His intelligence was even greater than average.
He knew right from wrong, could clearly recognize the red line drawn on the ground by law and virtue. He knew what he was doing, and he knew the consequences. But all the same he couldn't stop; he did all he could to be careful, considered how to conceal his crimes, erase whatever traces could be erased.
All these years, he'd felt like a person floating on the surface of the water. His upper body was exposed to the bright light of day. He was mixed in among regular people, considering the same problems of life as an ordinary person, agreeing with the outlooks of the majority. Only he never looked down.
Because his lower body was immersed in ice-cold muddy water.
He had been split into two for a long time, until just now, when a fierce external force had pushed his upper body, protruding out of the water, down into the mud. His mouth and nose had at once filled with the stinking, freezing "liquid." For a time, he couldn't catch his breath.
Luo Wenzhou patiently waited for him for a while before continuing. "The photographs you took were clear enough. You can see all the pits on their faces. We're already verifying their identities and summoning them one by one—now that I mention it, if we had their contact information and mailing addresses, that would be better. Why didn't you leave a sheet with them while you were at it?"
At his voice, Xu Wenchao's vague gaze fell on him. After a moment, his pupils finally found their focus, and he reacted to Luo Wenzhou's words.
"It's no use," he said.
"What do you mean?" said Luo Wenzhou.
"It's no use," Xu Wenchao said quietly. "You won't find evidence, and they won't admit it."
The policeman beside them had at last been frightened into wakefulness by his superior and the man being interrogated. Using the hints coming from his colleagues through his earbud, he finally caught up with that day's thousand li (18) of progress. He was immediately enraged and fiercely smacked the table. "We won't find the evidence?! That apartment full of bloodstains and weapons doesn't count as evidence? If those clear as day photographs aren't evidence, then what the fuck other evidence do you want?"
Xu Wenchao looked fixedly at him, something nearly like a bit of pitying sorrow in his expression.
He said, "But all those photographs are from the last decade."
The furious criminal policeman was bewildered when he heard this, wanting to grab this beast in human garb by the collar, give him a couple of shakes and make him talk. But Luo Wenzhou had already understood.
The "diners" Su Luozhan had spoken of had only ever bought girls; they hadn't participated in the follow-up. Did they know what the fate of those girls would be?
Of course they knew, but they could just as easily not admit it—
I didn't know where the girls came from. An acquaintance introduced me. It was just these few times.
How could they have been kidnapped? How could they have died? They clearly told me that they were all willing.
And even if they found the bodies, they would have been thoroughly cleaned. It would be very difficult to find traces. It was likely the police wouldn't find direct evidence to show the men were connected to the recent child kidnapping cases. And the photographs from the box of ashes could only show that they had sexually assaulted female children.
If these photographs had been taken before the "Visiting Young Girl Prostitutes Offense" had been removed, then according to the so-called "Leniency Theory" in criminal law, even if Lang Qiao brought back all five of the men in the photographs, then it was possible they would only have arrested some boorish men who'd "visited young girl prostitutes." They'd be fined some money, or at most shut up for three to five years and then let go(19).
And in this major case spanning more than twenty years, had there really only been five offenders?
"How to judge other people is our business at the public security authorities. Thank you for your concern on our behalf," said Luo Wenzhou, not batting an eyelid. "However considerate you are towards us, we still can't give you a silk banner. You'd be better off looking after yourself. From what I personally see, others may be able to escape blame, but you, Xu Wenchao, can't get away from the charges of kidnapping multiple children, killing them, and disposing of their bodies. What do you have to say?"
"In the end I, an outsider, am to assume all the consequences. Thinking about it, I think it's truly absurd." Xu Wenchao's clenched hands opened, slowly spreading. He said, "I'll tell you the truth. I never touched Su Luozhan, and I never touched any of those girls. I never took any money from this. I'm not a beast."
Luo Wenzhou was almost speechless. "Then what did you do? You took pictures, voluntarily undertook the cover-up? You're really a living Lei Feng."
Xu Wenchao said, "I did it for Su Xiaolan."
Saying so, he lightly lowered his eyes, gaze seeming to fall on a very distant place. "I was attracted to Su Xiaolan the first time I saw her at school. There was something special about her, I've never seen another girl who had it. I tried everything I could to get close to her, but she was too unsociable, and she often missed school. It seemed that aside from our homeroom teacher—our homeroom teacher was Wu Guangchuan then—no one else knew where she was… And in junior middle Year 2, even the new homeroom teacher didn't know where she was going. I found out then that she only ever seemed to be around Wu Guangchuan."
"You started following Wu Guangchuan before Guo Heng?"
"I didn't need to follow him. I could see him out my window every day. I rented an apartment near the school—you've already found that apartment. My mom was helping me with my studies then, but she also had to take care of an old relative. She was always being pulled in two directions. Except at mealtimes, I was basically always alone. Su Xiaolan was my first love, the kind you think about day and night." Xu Wenchao smiled, giving Luo Wenzhou an "all men understand this" expression. "Once I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night, picked up a photograph I'd secretly taken of her at our school's anniversary, and leaned back in bed 'relieving my frustrations.' My bed faced the window. It was summer, and the curtains hadn't been drawn. I saw Su Xiaolan coming home with Wu Guangchuan."
"In the middle of the night?"
"It must have been after midnight," said Xu Wenchao. "Wu Guangchuan was very prudent.
"Later… What I saw completely surpassed what I'd imagined—you know that a teenaged boy's imagination is mostly rather hazy—I was too shaken, I forgot to be angry or jealous. Later I came back to myself and thought that something wasn't right. Wu Guangchuan was a teacher, wasn't it a crime?
"I felt sick, and I suspected she wasn't willing. So I set an alarm, stealthily prepared a telescope, used the camera and lens I'd finally gotten out of my parents."
With one hand, Luo Wenzhou held down his colleague, who wanted to interrupt Xu Wenchao. He slowly twirled a pen in his fingers and calmly asked, "Then how did you find out that Su Xiaolan wasn't purely a victim? I don't suppose Wu Guangchuan would bring the kidnapped girls home?"
Xu Wenchao closed his eyes, revealing a somewhat self-ridiculing smile. "For a time, I really don't know what happened. All I could think about day and night was her. When I thought of her, I felt sadness and yearning, as well as mingled grief and indignation. I would have loved to rip Wu Guangchuan apart. Once I couldn't resist. I lied to my teacher and asked for a sick day to go see her. I just happened to see her with a girl I didn't know. I hesitated, then didn't go to say hello to her. I snuck away. But not long after that, there was a notice that that girl had gone missing. It was on the local news. I had a faint bad feeling then. I went to her house the next day, under the guise of taking her her homework. I saw her at home cutting up a dress… It was… It was the dress that girl had been wearing.
"She begged me in a panic not to tell anyone. I was scared out of my mind, really out of my mind. I simply didn't dare to think about what was happening. I felt like the sky had fallen down… But in the end…in the end, I couldn't bear it, I promised her." Xu Wenchao covered his face. "I was the class monitor, I could have a sick day just by asking for it. The teacher trusted me, didn't even look at my permission slip. But for her sake, I spied, lied, covered up a crime… I handed over my decade and more of a normal life… She ruined me, she completely ruined me. And I still loved her so much."
Luo Wenzhou followed up, "You didn't run into Su Hui at the Su house that day?"
Xu Wenchao shook his head. "If I had, I may not have been able to sit here talking to you."
Having heard this much, for a long while, Luo Wenzhou didn't continue questioning him. He pressed his thumbs to his temples and rather politely said, "Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Can you give me one, too?" said Xu Wenchao.
Luo Wenzhou very magnanimously lit one and passed it to him. "You don't seem like you have a cigarette habit."
"I don't." Xu Wenchao's fingers trembled a little as he took the cigarette, but his tone relaxed slightly. "I just occasionally smoke one or two with other people when I'm in company. Ordinarily I don't have much of a craving… Sorry, today is really too painful for me. These things have been weighing on my heart for over twenty years. I always pretended they didn't exist. Even the people closest to me don't know."
"Oh." Luo Wenzhou looked at his phone. There had been nothing yet from either Tao Ran or Lang Qiao. The cigarette had eased the atmosphere between the policeman and the suspect considerably. Rather mildly, he said, "I think I can understand.—Can you tell me what you were thinking when you helped Guo Heng investigate Wu Guangchuan?"
"I thought then that Wu Guangchuan was forcing her." Xu Wenchao let out a mouthful of smoke. "I promised Su Xiaolan not to go to the police or tell anyone else. Otherwise, she'd be finished. I had the wildest fantasies then… Little boys all have some heroism. I wanted to punish Wu Guangchuan myself, rescue Su Xiaolan. While I was following Wu, that uncle found me. He was investigating in secret, and so was I. We were both doing it for someone we loved. I pitied him, and besides, it felt safer having an adult around—but I never expected that he'd actually go and stab Wu Guangchuan to death. If I'd known, I never would have helped him."
"Why?" said Luo Wenzhou.
"That guy was crazy. It's lucky I didn't tell him what Su Xiaolan had done, and that Wu Guangchuan didn't have time to speak before he stabbed him, or else she wouldn't have gotten away." Xu Wenchao took two large drags. With smoke pouring out of him, his face seemed a little blurred. "Remembering it now, I'm scared for her all over again."
"Scared for her." Luo Wenzhou looked at him with a certain meaningful expression, quietly repeating what he'd said. Then he said, "How was your relationship with Su Xiaolan after Wu Guangchuan died?"
Xu Wenchao was silent for a long time. He seemed to feel his collar was choking him; he raised it with difficulty and shook it.
"Su Xiaolan hadn't been forced at all. She did it willingly. She was born an opium poppy growing on a rose bush, with poison in her roots—and she actually…actually truly and sincerely loved that…" Xu Wenchao raised an arm and rubbed hard at his face. "After that, she wilted. She was just a walking corpse. I simply didn't dare to believe it. Can you imagine how powerless I felt? And I still had to pretend I didn't know. I had to save up for a long time to buy some of her time from her mother."
"Wait a minute." Luo Wenzhou paused. "Su Luozhan isn't your daughter, is she?"
"She isn't," Xu Wenchao denied without even thinking about it. "I never touched Su Xiaolan. I only bought her time so I could be with her. It's not what you think.
"She was so venomous, so abnormal, but I still loved her. I couldn't hold her back, and I couldn't hold myself back, either…"
Having heard this much, the criminal policeman, who had been tormented all day by the victims' family members, could hardly stand it anymore. He seemed about to explode, turn Xu Wenchao's refined head into pulp. Once again held down by Luo Wenzhou's hand, which seemed to be cast in iron, he cried, "Boss!"
"There are still some things I haven't asked." Luo Wenzhou gave his colleague a look telling him to be patient. "Xu Wenchao, when did you start helping Su Xiaolan cover up? What role did you play in all this?"
"After Su Hui died." Xu Wenchao thought about it and let out a long sigh. "I suppose it's been ten years. When Su Hui was alive, every day Su Xiaolan wanted nothing better than for her to die. But when she really did die, she felt isolated. That gaming hall her mom had run was about to be torn down, too. Su Xiaolan said she didn't trust anyone else, she could only appeal to me. What else could I do? I had no bottom line when it came to her.
"Just then the owners of that apartment in the Sunward Estate were going abroad. My income was all right, and I got some money from my family. I had some savings, so I bought the apartment, only they left too quickly and didn't have time to transfer ownership." Xu Wenchao looked down. "I let her use that apartment."
"Oh," said Luo Wenzhou. "I've just about understood. At first, Su Xiaolan was a young girl. Before she was fully grown, she became a pregnant woman, and then a mother carrying a small child, all categories that people would give up their seats on the bus for. She used that to lower the victims' guard. She abducted the children, sold them to perverts to defile, then killed them to keep them from talking. You supplied the location and were responsible for taking care of the bodies. How did you do it? Dismember them? Find a place to throw them after you'd dismembered them? I'm right, aren't I?"
Xu Wenchao took a deep breath, covered his face, and didn't refute it.
"She died, but the nightmare wasn't over yet. I discovered that the child… Little Luozhan was a perfect copy of her. I didn't fit the requirements for adoption. I've spent the last two months racking my brain trying to think of a way. I looked away for a moment, and the child actually… She actually went and privately contacted those people again. When I heard about the girl who went missing in West Ridge, and then shortly after you summoned me to a public security bureau for questioning, do you know how shocked I was?" Xu Wenchao looked at Luo Wenzhou, his eyes red. "Go ahead and arrest me. It'll be like freeing me. I won't ever have to…"
Luo Wenzhou's phone vibrated gently, a message coming from Lang Qiao. "Boss, I arrested that asshole! He saw the photograph but still won't admit it, he keeps saying he didn't know the facts. Wait until I get a line about the others!"
"Wait, I still have a question." Luo Wenzhou was wholly unmoved by his "heartrending" confession. He put down his phone, his previously mild tone changing abruptly. "You're saying you couldn't control Su Luozhan, you didn't know anything, is that right? Why isn't that what the child said? She said the two of you worked pretty well together. You dressed up as an old blind man to follow Zhang Yuchen. When the child was alone, you suddenly appeared and frightened her, then had Su Luozhan appear and fool the child into trusting her. Did this happen?"
This gang's criminal method had always been headed by the members of the Su family. The "innocent" buyers only spent their money and enjoyed; they weren't willing to assume any risk. So the victims must have been chosen by the Su family. From determining the target to starting to follow her to implementing the kidnapping, it must have been a complete and strict process. They'd gotten their eye on Chenchen over a month ago, had gradually become acquainted with the rhythm of her daily activities, then taken decisive action at a suitable moment—this was in keeping with the method.
That meant that the method they'd previously assumed the "criminal gang" used, that is, that several suspects chose their own targets and used the little girl Su Luozhan as bait to lure in the victim, was impossible.
Xu Wenchao was too clever. When the initial shock had passed, he'd been able to analyze the evidence the police had found and, sticking as close to the facts as possible, had delicately shifted the blame off of himself—he'd only covered up out of sentiment, he was only an accomplice helping to take care of the bodies. But he had accidentally accorded with Su Xiaolan's diary, picked up the central criminal method in this case.
That meant that the person who'd followed Chenchen wasn't someone else; it was definitely him. He wasn't a passive shield, he was one of the active criminals!
Why had the "unexpected development" of Qu Tong occurred midway?
Why, when Xu Wenchao had been summoned for questioning because of Qu Tong, had he been so shocked when he'd worked out from the attitude of the police that Su Luozhan was copying the case from twenty years ago?
Because the kidnapping of Qu Tong had been carried out by Su Luozhan entirely on her own initiative. The girl had really gone "out of control." Attempting to shake herself free of the "janitor" she didn't care for, she had accepted a "private job" from one of the clients!
"Xu Wenchao, when you found out about Wu Guangchuan's relationship with Su Xiaolan, you were disgusted. You suspected Wu Guangchuan of rape. But you didn't tell anyone. You started to spy on them, take pictures of them." Luo Wenzhou watched him intently, giving him no time to respond. "Was it good? Did you get a kick out of it? Years afterward, was it still always on your mind?"
Xu Wenchao's face was ashen. He was covering his mouth tightly. His pupils were a little enlarged. His throat moved uncontrollably. A thin drop of sweat dripped from the tip of his nose.
"You say you saw Su Xiaolan with a strange girl, so you didn't go to say hello. Why? You couldn't say hello to a classmate because there was someone else there? Or is it that you hadn't meant to go say hello at all?" Luo Wenzhou suddenly stood up and grabbed Xu Wenchao's collar. "You unexpectedly saw Su Xiaolan cutting up floral-patterned dresses in her house. How did you unexpectedly see it, huh? She didn't hide it before opening the door? Because you burst in. You took advantage of Su Hui not being at home to burst into a room with only a girl in it… Xu Wenchao, what were you doing?"
"I didn't…"
"You didn't touch the girls," Luo Wenzhou lowered his voice, speaking into his ear, "because you can't get hard at all. You put a photograph of Su Xiaolan at thirteen in front of the box of her ashes, you plastered that old photograph from twenty years ago onto the window to fool yourself, because you were infatuated with the Su Xiaolan who was callous, abnormal, who hurt children her own age without hesitation, not the Su Xiaolan who was scared out of her wits by Wu Guangchuan's death, a 'sheep' who could be controlled by you and her psycho mother.
"Let me ask you. When you saw her committing crimes like back then with your own eyes, when you saw her taking care of the bodies, was that the only time you could get it up?"
Xu Wenchao could hardly sit up straight. He weakly pushed away Luo Wenzhou's hand. "I…"
"Why did you suddenly want to marry Su Xiaolan? Because you saw that twenty years later, Su Luozhan had grown up to be the perfect image of her back then, and you wanted to become Wu Guangchuan?
"You aren't a beast? Of course you aren't a beast. Beasts are pretty nice. They can do work, they can provide meat. Are you worthy of that?"
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Author's note:
(18) Traditional unit of measure equal to about a third of a mile/half a kilometer.
(19) Clear enough already, but to elucidate further: from 1997 to 2015 there was a criminal offense on the books of "visiting young girl prostitutes under fourteen years," which was treated as a sex crime but not as sexual assault, and the girls in question would also be guilty of underage prostitution. The law was taken off the books after mass public opinion outrage. The Leniency Policy is a fundamental principle in Chinese law, where when the laws have changed, the version used will the one more favorable to the defendant.