When Luo Wenzhou left the interrogation room, he felt he was somewhat delirious. The lengthy and strenuous process of interrogation was a sort of torment for both parties, especially when faced with a suspect with Xu Wenchao's psychological quality. Not giving the other party a chance to catch a breath in fact meant having no time to catch a breath yourself.
While those rushing around outside were still seeking all kinds of evidence, the interrogator and the interrogated had to read between the lines of each other's expressions for involuntarily betrayed traces of information to mutually deceive and mutually judge—
How much evidence do they actually have? How much did Su Luozhan actually say?
Where did he just contradict himself? Which of his words could be true, which of his words are dodges to get away from the major topic?
Are they tricking me?
How can I trick him to get him to confess?
The least slackening, and Xu Wenchao would immediately have seized the opportunity to quibble and retract. It was hopeless to think of substituting another interrogator.
Everything from Luo Wenzhou's neck up had basically shut down. Wholly relying on muscle memory, he mechanically navigated to his office.
Qu Tong's parents had heard the news and rushed off to Binhai without listening to any counsel to the contrary. Only Guo Heng was left.
Luo Wenzhou saw his back and thought that Guo Heng was sleeping. He instinctively lightened his steps and picked up a uniform jacket someone had tossed nearby. He was about to drape it over him when Guo Heng suddenly looked up.
The wrinkles around his eyes extended in complex twists and turns from the bridge of his nose to his temples, like the cracks in parched earth. In his eyes, their slightly yellowed whites shot through with blood vessels, there wasn't a trace of sleep.
The previously bustling office of the Criminal Investigation Team was utterly silent. The people were either still busy elsewhere, or else they hadn't been able to stand it any longer and had gone to sleep. The two men looked at each other wordlessly, the air seeming glued together, thick and motionless; the wind of the most powerful air-conditioning couldn't have blown it away.
After a long time, Guo Heng spoke first with difficulty. "Your…your leader surnamed Lu told me everything."
Luo Wenzhou slowly pulled up a chair and sat down across from him.
"He didn't give me too many specifics," said Guo Heng. "He said you were still verifying some details—can you tell me the particulars now?"
Luo Wenzhou paused. "On that summer day twenty years ago, Guo Fei by chance got acquainted with a girl who said she had come to Lotus Mountain with her teacher. The girl was wearing a floral-patterned dress and looked very pretty, but she seemed to have no sense of direction at all. She asked her the way several times. One day, when she got out of cram school, Guo Fei met the girl again. The girl seemed very worried, claimed that the teacher she'd come with was in the hospital, and she couldn't find the way back to the hotel alone. Guo Fei was a warm-hearted child. At the end of each term, the teachers all commented that she was 'willing to help others.' To this day the records are in the Lotus Mountain Elementary School's archives. She tried to explain the directions a few times, but the girl still didn't understand. It was only a little detour, anyway, she thought. She'd only be a few minutes late. So she decided to personally take the girl where she wanted to go…"
From the first time he had mentioned the name of "Guo Fei," Guo Heng had been shaking uncontrollably. His turbid tears rolled from the corners of his eyes, redirected by row after row of wrinkles to the white hair at his temples.
At this point, Luo Wenzhou stopped for a moment and put his hand on Guo Heng's shoulder. Put together, the skinny shoulders and the heaving chest looked like a slimy and old-fashioned broken-down bellows.
Guo Heng took a difficult breath. "Talk. Keep talking."
"That girl—she was Su Xiaolan. She tricked Guo Fei into taking a drink that had been drugged. She left her in the hotel, waiting for the killer Wu Guangchuan to get out of the hospital. Wu Guangchuan used his poor health as an excuse to get away from the rest of his team and take one of the company cars. After murdering Guo Fei, Wu Guangchuan hid her in the trunk of the car and left Lotus Mountain. Su Xiaolan took Guo Fei's pencil box." Though he knew, judging from Su Xiaolan's diary, the uniformity of the method of the crimes, and other facts, that the one who'd murdered Guo Fei must in fact have been Su Xiaolan, Luo Wenzhou used his seemingly objective tone to lightly twist the facts. "Su Xiaolan had a twisted relationship with the killer that made her very jealous of the victim. In the middle of their offense, an altercation occurred between Su Xiaolan and the killer because of this. She furiously got out of the car, ran down that slope you discovered, saw the public phone next to the waste transfer station, and suddenly thought of a means of relief—to call you and let you hear that scream, and also to let your hear the pencil box."
"Why would she… Why…"
"Because she was jealous that Guo Fei had parents like you, had a happy home, had grown up into a little girl ten thousand times better than her, had things she wouldn't possess even after living another twenty years."
At his tone, Guo Heng looked at Luo Wenzhou and for a time couldn't speak.
"Uncle Guo, you didn't kill the wrong person then. You were only…too kind-hearted. You didn't suspect the other person in that house at all," Luo Wenzhou said quietly. "But because you killed Wu Guangchuan in front of her, Su Xiaolan was intimidated. She knew for the first time that doing these things would call down retribution. Her life afterwards was painful and deformed, and the frequency of her crimes was greatly reduced. You virtually saved quite a few potential victims—over a hundred at least."
But Guo Heng covered his eyes, unable to speak for tears.
"Uncle Guo…" said Luo Wenzhou.
"Don't say it." Guo Heng absently waved a hand at him. "Don't trouble yourself to find pleasant-sounding words to comfort me. Thank you."
Because he'd rashly stabbed Wu Guangchuan back then and scared Su Xiaolan out of using the same method to torment the victims' relatives, even making her alter her methods, the records of those murdered little girls had afterwards vanished among numerous other missing children, only coming to light once more fully twenty years late.
Guo Heng had been impulsive and easily angered, but he wasn't at all stupid. He could pick out this type of obviously flawed lie.
"So where is my Feifei now?"
"Su Hui, the principal offender from back then, didn't participate in that case. So our conjecture is that Guo Fei must be along the national road that led from Lotus Mountain to the city at the time."
"Can you…can you still find her? Are you still looking?"
"We can find her," said Luo Wenzhou. "A person can't be made to vanish just like that. She must still be hidden somewhere. There are always traces. Even if we can't find her for a time, there will still be hope. Even if others forget, I'll remember. Set your mind at ease."
Guo Heng left the City Bureau by the first rays of another morning. Luo Wenzhou watched him go until he was out of sight. He didn't know what would happen to Guo Heng now, but whether he was sixty, seventy, or eighty, a person still had to live, still had to keep going through his days, still had to turn his eyes forward.
Perhaps Luo Wenzhou was only consoling himself, but he thought that Guo Heng's back had seemed a little straighter.
Luo Wenzhou, dragging heavy steps, returned to his office and half-collapsed into his chair. He let out a long breath, then felt he seemed to have forgotten something. He looked up and saw a cup of already cool coffee set out on his desk.
Right, he'd made Fei Du wait for him!
But clearly Young Master Fei couldn't wait in the bureau for him all night. He must have left long ago.
As Luo Wenzhou picked up the cup of coffee in confusion and looked it up and down, a hand reached out from beside him and lifted the cup. Then, a dim thread of Mu Xiang cologne entered his nose from the cuff of this person's sleeve. Luo Wenzhou subconsciously breathed in, his nose going a little dry.
Fei Du had once again crawled out of some expensive hotel. He'd changed his clothes. Under Luo Wenzhou's confused gaze, he put the breakfast and coffee packed up by the hotel on the table.
Luo Wenzhou subconsciously said, "You really must have nothing better to do. Every day you stay at a hotel instead of going home. Does your company run the place?"
"You could say that," Fei Du answered matter-of-factly. "I own 60% of the interest."
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
Big bosses who flaunted their wealth in front of the salaried class on purpose were all assholes.
"Didn't you tell me to wait for you because you had some things you wanted to say to me?"
"Oh, right." Luo Wenzhou opened the coffee and drank a big mouthful, attempting to use the coffee to find his lost brain. "I wanted to tell you…"
What had he been going to say?
Luo Wenzhou stopped, finding in wonder that there was a temporary break in his memory. However he rifled through it, he still came up empty. He couldn't remember a single punctuation mark, experiencing an early symptom of Alzheimer's.
Fei Du's white shirt was starting to look a little dazzling, almost giving him double vision.
"To tell you…"
Fei Du watched him babble some words as if talking in his sleep. Then he tilted sideways following the back of the chair; he had actually fallen asleep like that. Fei Du deftly propped up the coffee still in Luo Wenzhou's hand, lightly rescuing the cup that had almost fallen to the floor. Then he arranged Luo Wenzhou's hand in a comfortable position.
The man was frowning faintly. He looked very wan, his eyelids folded into three layers and his ordinarily very clean-shaven chin covered in stubble, oddly giving him something of the dejected "uncle" feeling. His face looked as if it had thinned out. After working nonstop for forty-eight hours, even an immortal would be dispirited. Of course his face wouldn't look very good. But somehow his usual air of a glib-tongued young lordling had disappeared, and something more profound and substantial had been left behind in its wake.
Fei Du turned and leaned on his desk, reaching out two fingers to lift Luo Wenzhou's chin. For a moment he gently scrutinized his face, like a collector of antiques scrutinizing and fondling a piece of Ru official ware (1). After a moment, he stood up straight and sighed soundlessly, admitting that he had been moved by this face.
Lang Qiao, dragging her steps like a dead dog, had just rolled back in from outside. She'd thought she could sleep soundly lying down in the middle of the road, but when she raised her head and unfortunately encountered this scene, all the drowsiness filling her head was startled out of existence. She felt that all the "domineering director-general" pornographic novels she'd read in her life were blowing past before her eyes with a whistle. Standing dumbstruck in the doorway, the policewoman became a stiff corpse.
The "domineering director-general" harboring evil intentions wasn't in the least flustered. He turned his head, blinked at her, and gave her an unusually thought-provoking smile. He pointed at the big bag of food next to him, indicating that she should help herself. Then he picked up the coffee Luo Wenzhou had just drunk and sipped it, floating out.
The light of the rising sun stabbed Tao Ran's eyes so he couldn't quite open them. His colleagues who had rushed over to assist took over for him, and he went to rest. He carelessly shook the soil off of himself and got into a random car. Just then, his phone vibrated. A photograph came from Chang Ning of herself with Chenchen in her arms, tightly clinging to her big sister's clothes but still struggling to smile at the camera.
"The doctor said Chenchen's injuries were all light and she could leave the hospital. My aunt says we have to thank all of you. Another day, could I ask you and your colleagues to come over for a meal?"
For the first time, Tao Ran didn't immediately respond to the goddess's message. Holding his phone, he fell asleep.
Fei Du took a taxi back to his office. Before the workday had started, he signed the documents he'd promised Assistant Miao he would attend to, then sat alone for a while in a tastefully decorated office.
This was the old President Fei's office from before. At the door was a waiting room with a liquor cabinet concealed in the wall. Next to it was a large bookcase that reached the ceiling. The upper half was a collection of all kinds of only extant copies, sheepskin rolls, silks, and even bamboo slips, everything you could want. The lower half displayed the watch collection of the office's previous master.
The other wall was a display case entirely covered in glass, hung full of ancient weaponry. Among them was a broadsword that was said to have been carried by an ancient emperor. The grip was elegant; after all these years, the blade was still bright as snow. Under the cold light of the display case, it looked as though it were about to break out of the case to eat flesh and drink blood.
Between the couches was a stand 1.4 meters tall, round, displaying around its edges all kinds of currency no longer in circulation, surrounding a small display in the center where the works of three successive winners of a certain international jewelry design competition were arranged—only three years. Before the fourth year's could be put there, the collector himself had gone to lie in the seaside sanatorium like a corpse.
Everyone, on first arriving to his office, would be shocked by the small-scale museum in the waiting room. If a person lingered there for long, money, authority, ambition, and desire would be ready to simply pour out of all his pores.
The office, meanwhile, was half separated from and half connected to the waiting room, linked by a passage wide enough for only one person to pass through. There was a clever curve to the passage that prevented the light from the office from getting in. On two sides, the office had small windows for ventilation, while in back was a huge floor-to-ceiling window from which one could clearly look down on half of Yan City, the flow of traffic slowly lining up and the pedestrians as small as ants all visible at a glance.
Fei Du stood and took a not especially thick folder from a locked filing cabinet. In the folder were some contracts, financial statements, and explanations of changes in major assets. It was a collaboration undertaken in the conglomerate's name with a "Guangyao Fund." When his father had reigned, he'd collaborated with this fund and made a fixed contribution to its subsidiary public interest fund.
The contract term had already expired and the collaboration had naturally come to an end; the other party had shown no signs of wanting to renew the contract.
And lying quietly at the bottom of the pile of documents was a project plan for "Binhai Marine Resources Recreational Holy Land—Making a Chinese Maldives" that had requested an investment from them. Back then, his father, who had laid down the law for the board of directors, had refused with the reason of "capital investment comparatively large, no mature profit model," and it had then come to nothing.
"Binhai…" Fei Du heavily traced a line on it with the cap of his pen.
The three great principles of disposing of a body—
First, the place where the body is disposed of is absolutely safe. No one outside of your control will come to dig it up, and no one will discover the secret under the earth.
Second, a place where you could hide the body among ordinary corpses, so anyone who found it wouldn't call the police.
Third, even if they did call the police, the police would have no way of determining the identity of the deceased.
The third principle had been usable twenty years earlier, but today, with the development of all kinds of criminal investigation forensic technologies, it basically couldn't be realized. So given Xu Wenchao's IQ, he would definitely adhere to the first two.
Why would he choose Binhai?
If he threw the bodies off the coast, there would be a great risk of them being fished up. To throw them further out, however, would require a means of getting out to sea, and it couldn't be done in all seasons. There would have to be some bodies that could only be buried on dry land.
There was nothing in the origins or experiences of Xu Wenchao and the three generations of the Su family to show that they had any connection to the city of Binhai. So what reason had made Xu Wenchao choose it? Could it just have been the freelance photographer happening to think that the scenery was beautiful and untouched?
A week later, with the collaboration of the police in both places, the dust at last settled on this unusually complicated, unusually lengthy, unusually sensational major case.—Under all kinds of coercion and cajolery, the pianist from the racetrack had finally identified one of the other four men in the photographs. They'd had a very strict system of enrollment. They had to have someone introduce them. At first, they only had permission to take the little girl Su Luozhan out to eat. They had to spend a great deal of money and maintain a relationship for a very long time before they were permitted to become "senior members."
As the "members" mutually identified each other, it was like picking a radish out of the ground and getting a whole string—including those who weren't in the photographs, "old members" who had already withdrawn from the transactions. Among them there was actually no lack of respectable-seeming successful personages; there was quite a sensation when the police came to their doors.
Closely according with the line of thought Fei Du had supplied, Guo Fei's body was found in a wild graveyard in a village along the national road from Lotus Mountain to the city. The people who lived there said that, before they'd practiced cremation, the place had been specially used to bury the bodies of those who had died violent deaths or who had died young. The place had many superstitious legends, and usually no one dared to approach. Back then there had been a villager who'd gotten drunk and mistakenly wandered in. He'd happened to discover a burial mound that shouldn't have been there, gotten scared out of his wits, and spread a good number of ghost stories.
Unfortunately, due to the taboo, no one had gone to check.
The news, evidence collection, public charges… The follow-up work was non-stop. When it came to an end, Luo Wenzhou suddenly realized that it was already the middle of September.
On the first day he resumed a life of normal working hours, he hadn't yet had time to celebrate when he saw a little sports car stopped at the gates, with a familiar scoundrel standing next to it, smiling as he watched a traffic cop hand out a ticket.
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Authors note:
(1) Extremely rare Song Dynasty porcelain.