Dong Qian lived in the Wave's Bend Estate.
This was a very new residential area. A few years before, all this had still been damp, narrow little alleys; later, it had been remade into one of the grand city's beneficiaries. Dong Qian's family had been moved out and moved back into a bright and clean resettlement house there.
All the houses constructed in recent years were very advanced, with "radiant floor heating," "central air-conditioning," "new model systems"; recently it felt like rather Western-sounding nouns had become the distinguishing mark of new residences. As a new generation of the city's middle class had begun to buy quality of life, they'd wanted a nice neighborhood, wanted quiet, wanted services, wanted convenience. The old residents had blearily signed the resettlement agreements, finding a place to shelter at the edges of the "quality life," as if they'd also been integrated into the high tide of the "quality metropolis"… Of course, only those who had come to live there knew that this only looked good on the outside.
There was a thick partition between the commercial housing and the housing where former residents had been resettled. The divide was tightly sealed. On one side was bare cement, while on the other was an exquisite man-made landscape, separating the similar-looking houses by class.
When Xiao Haiyang and his colleague left Dong Qian's house, they found that the place where they'd parked their police car had been surrounded by a circle of people.
"This car came first thing in the morning," an old man walking his dog was saying. "I saw it when I was buying breakfast. I don't know what they've been investigating this long."
"Don't you know there's a murderer living there? The address they dug up online is that house." A young person with the look of a student held up his phone for the old man to see. The dog-walking old fart narrowed his eyes in somewhat uncomprehending awe at the gale-force flow of information.
"Hey, are those two police?"
Before Xiao Haiyang could open the car door, he was nearly drowned in the babbling crowd.
"Mr. Policeman, I hear that assassin lives there. Did you come because of that?"
First Xiao Haiyang froze. Then he shook his head repeatedly. "No, don't make wild guesses. Please move out of the way."
The young person holding up the phone curiously asked, "Is there really an illegitimate son?"
Before the words were out of his mouth, a fashionably dressed lady yanked him from behind. "Stop asking about this sort of useless gossip. If you keep fooling around online, I'll take away your phone.—Officer, I'd just like to ask a little question. Did the one who crashed the car die or not? Did you arrest him? Living next door to a murderer, you know…"
Xiao Haiyang's hand paused in the middle of opening the car door. Then he pretended he hadn't heard, lowering his head and getting into the car without uttering a sound.
"Hey, why are you leaving? Is that any way to answer? This is a question that concerns mass public safety!"
A man in a parked car nearby grumbled, "I said before we shouldn't buy a house so close to the resettlement quarters. You have no idea who's living next to you…"
Xiao Haiyang didn't wait for his colleague to close the door before stepping on the gas. He left the residential estate's parking lot as if he were being chased. As soon as he drove out of the estate's main gate, a minibus with the logo of a certain news outlet on it met them head-on. The colleague was sharp-eyed. He quickly poked Xiao Haiyang. "Go by the side streets. Don't invite trouble."
Xiao Haiyang spun the steering wheel, turning off into the twisting side streets, out of the corner of his eye glimpsing a few people with cameras over their shoulders getting out of the minibus and chasing a few steps after them. Seeing they couldn't catch up, they laid down their arms and took a few photographs of the police car driving away.
The colleague looked back nervously, determined that there were no complications, then at last relaxed, saying to Xiao Haiyang, "Rumor really does move fast. I'm telling you, Haiyang, times aren't what they were. If you run into this kind of thing while investigating a case, you have to remember to watch your mouth, and if you can't, take a deep breath and run. If there's been no official statement, we can't say a single word too much. That's discipline. Otherwise, I think the boss would give you a seeing to."
First Xiao Haiyang rather inarticulately nodded. After a while, he abruptly asked, "Can Dong Xiaoqing keep living here?"
First the colleague gave an uncertain "yeah," then came around and rather indifferently waved a hand. "It'll definitely be unpleasant for a while, but after a time it'll be all right. Everyone is so busy. Whose memory is that long? Don't worry, in another month or two no one will remember."
With a heavy heart, Xiao Haiyang gave an affirmative. His driving wasn't anywhere near as boisterous as the rest of him. It was even a little overly cautious. He saw a light change from far away and gently braked the car. The old service car slowly came to such a smooth stop that the people inside hardly felt it shake.
"But she herself definitely won't forget," Xiao Haiyang said suddenly.
The colleague looked at him in surprise.
"If in the end we still haven't been able to find clear evidence to show whether Dong Qian is a killer or an innocent, this business will weigh on her heart forever. At first when people ask her, suspect her, she'll argue desperately, unwilling to believe under any circumstances that her father could be an assassin. But this business is going to be like a splinter, coming up every now and then, like Schrödinger's box."
The colleague hadn't expected him to suddenly express so many feelings. Staring, he asked him, "Schrödinger? Isn't that a cat?"
"A box with a cat in it." Xiao Haiyang stared fixedly at the traffic light, his glasses slipping down a little, the frames blocking his eyelids, giving him a rather depressed look. "Each day you don't open it is another day you don't know whether the cat is still alive, and the the box will forever press on your heart, so that you can't think of anything else. Every day, as soon as it gets dark, you'll go in circles around that box, like a fishbone stuck in the throat. Every day, you'll suspect… This kind of wound can never heal."
The average person's everyday conversations were either idle chat or business communications. In the culture of Eastern people, discussing feelings with people you weren't very close with didn't seem so "everyday"; it would give people the awkward feeling of talking intimately to comparative strangers.
The colleague hemmed and hawed a while, not knowing how to respond to this rambling speech. In the end he only gave a dry laugh.
But Xiao Haiyang seemed to be immersed in his own world, neither feeling any of his colleague's awkwardness nor expecting an answer from him. Having said what he was going to say, he closed his mouth and sank into some other place.
In the Wave's Bend Estate, Dong Xiaoqing sat alone in her living room, holding her phone; next to her, a local TV station was playing the sensational news about the Zhou Clan at regular intervals. From time to time, the name of the responsible driver, "the individual Dong," flashed by in an unobtrusive corner. There were three cups of leftover cold tea on the coffee table, announcing the recent presence of guests.
The person on the phone spoke very gently. It was their human resources manager. "Look, Xiao Dong, you've really had a lot going on at home lately. Even though it's the busy season now, everyone really feels for you. I asked the boss what to do, and the higher-ups think that you should rest for a while, take care of yourself and not worry about work… If you have any trouble, you can always tell the company, and if we can resolve it, we'll definitely do our best to help you. All right?"
This was a tactful dismissal. Dong Xiaoqing understood it. She didn't want to make an ugly scene, so she did her best to force her voice not to shake. "All right, Manager Wang. Thanks for going to the trouble."
"Hey, no trouble, no trouble at all." The person on the line relaxed at having successfully dealt with her. On account of Dong Xiaoqing's sensibility, his voice softened even further. "There's nothing I can do for you in these circumstances, but I've just submitted a report to the boss to request an additional quarter's salary and supplement for you…"
The unflagging sounds of knocking came from outside the door. "Miss Dong, are you home? We're the Yan City Evening News, we'd like to ask you a few questions."
"…give it to you all at once. While it might not be much, it's still better than nothing. If you need a letter of recommendation in the future, feel free to come to me."
"Miss Dong? Strange, there must be someone in there, I can hear voices… Hello, is there anyone home?"
Dong Xiaoqing took a difficult breath and held her head.
These clamorous noises were like water, powerfully flowing back and forth. They weren't necessarily well-intentioned nor necessarily ill-intentioned, but the person caught in their eddies, unable to struggle out, unable to catch a breath, understood how it felt to be drowning.
But while drowning, this person couldn't complain about this or that individual drop of water.
Then who should they go reason it out with?
Since time immemorial, no one had been able to offer an explanation.
Dong Xiaoqing didn't know how she managed to finish the phone call with her job. She'd become a mechanical walking corpse. After a long time, she finally came back to herself.
The people at the door had finally left. She'd taken out the phone's battery herself. The thrill-seeking news item on the TV had concluded at some point, and the daily variety show had begun to play again.
She curled up numbly, vague gaze fixed on a piece of paper under a teacup that had a phone number written on it—the policeman wearing glasses had left it, telling her to call him any time if she remembered any clues or had any difficulties.
Hypocrite, thought Dong Xiaoqing, her face expressionless.
The clamorous doorbell rang yet again.
Dong Xiaoqing gave a start. She felt an indescribable anger and swiftly stood up, snatching a glass off the table, spilling half of the water onto the couch. The person at the door tried knocking, muttering "no one there" to himself. Then there was a creak, and the express delivery person, as usual, shoved a package into the little compartment in the hall and quickly left.
Dong Xiaoqing hastily pressed some paper napkins onto the couch to soak up the water, hesitated a moment, then looked out the peephole to investigate. Determining there was no one outside, she quickly opened the door a crack and took the express delivery package inside like a thief.
The package wasn't at all heavy. It was tightly wrapped. She remembered she hadn't bought anything, so who would send her a package at this time? Dong Xiaoqing suspiciously read through the packing list. Then she froze instantly—
It had come from the address of the freight company where Dong Qian had worked when he'd been alive. The sender and the recipient were both Dong Qian.
After Zhou Junmao's cause of death had been thrown into suspicion, in Dong Qian's capacity as suspect, all of his personal possessions at his home and place of work had been searched by the police, only excepting this package sent in the same city that had taken two or three days to arrive by "Chinese Expressly Slow Delivery."
Dong Xiaoqing impatiently tore the package open with her bare hands. The first thing to fall out of it was a black-and-white memorial photograph of a woman. The same photograph was hanging in her living room; it was her mother, who had died when she was a small child. After that came horrifying pictures of the scene of a car crash and the death certificate that had been issued after the rescue efforts had failed at the hospital.
There was a newspaper clipping stuck to the death certificate, a story related to the car crash Dong Xiaoqing's mom had died in.
Dong Xiaoqing thought at first that these were relics her father had been storing and was about to ignore them when her gaze inadvertently swept over a few sentences of the old newsprint. It was as though a bucket of cold water had been splashed directly into her face; in an instant she woke from her muddled state—the main character of this news clipping wasn't the woman who had died innocently in the car crash; it was a rather renowned entrepreneur of the time.
The entrepreneur had been driving along when he'd suddenly been rear-ended by a truck. His sedan had lost control and gone into the next lane, dragging in a passing van, fermenting a multi-car pile-up. The driver of the sedan and the responsible driver had died on the scene, while Dong Qian and his wife had been riding in the van. They'd both been taken to the hospital. The wife had been critically injured and had unfortunately passed away when rescue efforts failed.
Dong Xiaoqing impatiently shook everything out of the package—inside there was an unintelligible diagram of vehicle routes, some mimeographed hand-drawn pictures, a photocopy of an enormous bill for something or other, several close-up photographs of license plates, and a pile of personal information about some strangers.
And one of them was Zhou Junmao!
There was a photograph stuck behind the biographic sketch of Zhou Junmao; it was of the Bentley the old man had been riding in at the time of his car crash.
Dong Xiaoqing's heart jumped, and her hands began to tremble. She saw an envelope under the pile of documents with "Xiao Qing" crookedly written on it. This was Dong Qian's sloppy, somewhat childishly awkward handwriting!
A few days had passed in the blink of an eye since Zhou Huaijin's kidnapping, and not only had the level of enthusiasm not calmed, it had become even more intense. All the photographs and articles concerning Zhou Huaijin participating in business conferences in his youth were turned up, and even the Zhou Clan's mysterious other founder, who had disappeared decades ago, was once again brought up.
"This person's Chinese name was 'Zhou Yahou'… Gosh, he was pretty good-looking." Lang Qiao was walking around and around the office. "He was part-Chinese, part-American, with slightly more Chinese heritage, and married an ethnically Chinese woman, a second-generation immigrant from a rich family. He dropped out of a famous school to go into business.—Zhou Junmao was entirely his footman back then, and don't even mention Zheng Kaifeng. He'd just left the country illegally and was a hooligan dodging around here and there."
Tao Ran looked up in surprise. "Zheng Kaifeng left the country illegally?"
"He ran for it when he was in his teens," said Lang Qiao. "He spent a few years working for a human smuggler, then somehow hooked up with Zhou Junmao and got himself a legal identity. Looking at the miserable state he was in then and comparing it to the way he is now—the ups and downs of human life…really are hard to predict."
Someone next to her protested, "Qiaoqiao, don't pace like that, you're making me dizzy."
"I'm hungry, comrade!" Lang Qiao howled in anguish. "Our zookeeper is ten minutes late. My stomach is digesting itself."
She'd just spoken when the aroma of jianbing floated in from the corridor. Lang Qiao leapt to the door in two steps, like a citizen of enemy-held territory seeing the liberating army. With deep emotion, she cried, "Boss!"
Luo Wenzhou went around her. "Settle down."
"Starving children don't have to settle down." Lang Qiao hastily grabbed the stuff out of his hands. "Hey, why did you buy so many different kinds today?"
Luo Wenzhou didn't answer, thinking, Who knows what that menace is going to refuse to eat?
It was Friday, time for Fei Du to report to the bureau again. Luo Wenzhou had originally bought breakfast as usual, but at the last moment he had thought of this complication and wandered over to buy something else, accidentally making himself late.
Pretending nothing was going on, he strolled over to his office, saw Fei Du's empty desk, and immediately, with an air of propriety, put on a stern look. "Didn't I emphasize discipline? What is this, now? Tao Ran, call him and see why he's not here yet. Where's he fooling around now?"
Tao Ran: "…"
Luo Wenzhou belatedly noticed that everyone's expressions were very strange. "What are you all looking at me for?"
Winking and gesturing, Lang Qiao pointed at the jacket on Fei Du's seat. Deliberately "lowering" her voice to a level that everyone could hear, she said, "He came half an hour ago and went to Chief Lu's office."
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
Tao Ran slowly added, "Oh, right, Director Lu just called the office looking for you. I picked up, and he swore and asked me, 'Is there any way to improve Luo Wenzhou's lax discipline?'"
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
The whole Main Criminal Investigation Team ate Captain Luo's food while collectively roasting Captain Luo.