Lang Qiao didn't know what was going on with Luo Wenzhou. She waited with her heart in her throat for ages, thinking their Captain China had once again gone in alone to some spider demon's Cavern of Silken Webs. She didn't dare to leave, prepared for him to call for backup.
In the end, no cry for help came. She only received an order to keep her mouth shut.
Luo Wenzhou said: "Keep what I asked you about before secret. If you behave, I'll bring you some red braised pork another day. If you dare to leak it, you'll be the main ingredient!"
Lang Qiao: "…"
She thought that if her willpower had been a little weaker, she would have become the first eldest princess in human history to commit patricide over red braised pork.
As Policewoman Lang cursed her boss for a scoundrel, she ungrudgingly arranged the information related to all sides of Zhou Junmao's case.
The whole day of sudden happenings was truly dazzling. The whole city was welcoming the weekend while looking on at the wealthy family drama. Only the City Bureau, with a new wave rising as soon as the last one had calmed, was still working overtime.
"I arranged to go see a movie with a schoolmate this weekend." Lang Qiao hung off the door of the conference room. Pressing her fingers to her eyelids to avoid unnecessary lines around her eyes, face expressionless, she wailed, "Why do we have to work overtime again, it's such a pain!"
Luo Wenzhou quickly walked up behind her, casually asking, "A male classmate or a female classmate?"
Lang Qiao said, "…female."
"What do you want to hang around with a bunch of girls all day for? You aren't a lesbian." Luo Wenzhou carelessly waved a hand. "It's better to work overtime than go to a movie with a girl. At least here you'll get the princess treatment."
"Good grief, what rotten country's princess gets ordered around like a donkey? The kind that's doomed to total annihilation and the burning of its ancestral tombs, I think." Lang Qiao rolled her eyes at Luo Wenzhou's back, then gave Fei Du a strange look. "Hey, President Fei, why haven't you left yet?"
Fei Du didn't answer, because he'd pondered it the whole way and still couldn't understand why he, as a temporary member of staff, had to come back to ungrudgingly work overtime with them.
Therefore he could only smile at Lang Qiao.
When he came into the conference room and sat down, Fei Du finally said to Luo Wenzhou, "I don't think I get overtime pay."
"No need to think, you don't even get a salary, just a bit of a subsidy for the project," Luo Wenzhou said. Without waiting for Fei Du to answer, he added, "Though given our salary, the difference between having it and not having it is the difference between zero and nearly zero. Do you care?"
Fei Du: "…"
Luo Wenzhou had stolen his lines, leaving nothing behind. There was no place to start ridiculing. He could only straighten his clothes and sit upright.
As soon as she entered the conference room, Lang Qiao professionally set aside her cherished idea of a movie and gave a careful analysis of the state of affairs. "Right now there are two things that we can basically determine: first, Zhou Huaijin's kidnapping really was a performance he put on himself. Hu Zhenyu was evidently his accomplice, and he's been brought along for questioning, as well. Second, Zhou Huaixin really was killed by Dong Xiaoqing. There are security camera tapes and eyewitnesses, no room for dispute. But we have no clear suspect or motive for Dong Xiaoqing being killed in order to silence her soon after, nor for the fire set at her house. But according to our inferences, it's likely it was related to Dong Xiaoqing's objective to assassinate Zhou Huaijin."
"How is Zhou Huaijin now?" Luo Wenzhou asked.
"In custody," said Lang Qiao, "but his mental state is very bad. He's been curled up in a chair ever since he got here, holding his head and not making a sound. We brought him food and water, but he hasn't moved. He's been fasting up to now."
"What are the circumstances with Dong Qian and Dong Xiaoqing?"
"Dong Qian was reticent. He normally had contact with few friends or family members." Tao Ran picked up the subject. "Pretty much the only people he had relatively close dealings with were his coworkers at the fleet. Because the customers he accepted jobs from weren't fixed, he didn't always drive the same route, so he didn't regularly visit any service stations or eateries. But his coworkers did remember something—Haiyang, you found it, come tell us about it."
Named without warning, Xiao Haiyang stared, subconsciously standing up. "Yes, sir!"
A good number of hands reached out from beside him to pull him down. "Talk sitting down."
Xiao Haiyang lowered his head awkwardly and pushed at his glasses, switching over to rapid-fire mode. "Dong Qian's coworkers remembered that he often shopped online. Express delivery people were always looking for him. On average he received two or three packages every week. I investigated the father and daughter's online shopping records and found that Dong Qian's frequency of ordering online really has been very high for the last year, and the frequency of returning goods has also been high…"
Luo Wenzhou looked up. "Get right to the important point. Do you think there's a problem with the express delivery, or with a seller?"
"The express delivery," Xiao Haiyang answered without thinking. "Over eighty percent of the goods he returned had been delivered by the same express delivery company, called Quick Conveyance Express Delivery. I looked into it. Because of its slow delivery speed, high prices, and irregular management, the company's market share is currently very low—in a survey of online shopping, less than 5% of businesses use Quick Conveyance. Meanwhile, over 50% of the goods Dong Qian received were delivered by Quick Conveyance, a tenfold difference. It can't be coincidence."
Luo Wenzhou nodded. "That makes sense. And so?"
"If the paper document that the arsonist burned was an important item, it would have been hard for us to miss it when we were investigating him. But what if while we were searching, that document was on the way? It usually takes Quick Conveyance Express Delivery three to five days to deliver within the same city. That makes the right time difference."
Having heard this much, Luo Wenzhou's expression sank. He interrupted, using his full name. "Xiao Haiyang, are these pure guesses, or do you have some basis?"
Xiao Haiyang hesitated somewhat in front of his forceful question. "I…I have a basis…"
"Don't play stupid with me." Luo Wenzhou's tone became stern. "Everyone on the team is here now. If you have something to say, say it. I know your brain is up to it."
In order to guarantee that this thing wouldn't fall into the hands of the police, the person who had sent the express delivery package had purposefully used a delivery service that took most of a week to deliver within the same city, but how could he have guaranteed that the police would have finished all they needed to do for their investigation within those three to five days?
If the police had been inefficient and spent a couple of weeks investigating, wouldn't the package have arrived right in front of them?
What Xiao Haiyang had just said seemed reasonable, but in fact there was an implication in it, hinting that they had a traitor.
When this Little Glasses had something to say, he was categorically unwilling to come right out and say it; he always had to dodge around it. Perhaps this bad habit was left behind from the Flower Market District Sub-Bureau—the first time Luo Wenzhou and the others had come to look at He Zhongyi's body, he'd put on an act of being a hothead who couldn't control his mouth to hint that the place where the body had been dumped wasn't the place where the murder had been committed.
This was the same old trick now.
Luo Wenzhou said, "What is the basis for your judgement?"
Xiao Haiyang slowly lowered his eyes. Through his glasses, he met his young superior's eyes. "I requested that the Quick Conveyance Express Delivery Company submit to me all the express delivery orders and information and found that before Dong Qian died, there was a package sent from his fleet to the Dong house."
Fei Du put in a word. "You just said 'there was a package sent,' not 'Dong Qian sent home a package.' So, Officer Xiao, you think that Dong Qian didn't send that package himself."
Xiao Haiyang said, "If Dong Qian really did assassinate Zhou Junmao, he used the method of the car crash to make it unnoticeable, make people think it was an accident. So what would he leave Dong Xiaoqing? The identity of the person who wanted Zhou Junmao dead, or a vindication of himself for being the real murderer? That doesn't make sense, unless he wanted to put his daughter in danger, or make her suffer her whole life."
"What you mean is, someone sent some things to Dong Xiaoqing to incite her to kill Zhou Huaijin. Then, to prevent those things from reaching the police via Dong Xiaoqing, he silenced her, and at the same time set her house on fire." Luo Wenzhou fixed his eyes on Xiao Haiyang, pressing on and asking, "Why? If this person could brazenly run Dong Xiaoqing over right in front of my face, why couldn't he kill Zhou Huaijin himself? Are you telling me an ordinary little girl is a safer bet when it comes to killing someone than a professional? Also, I can't understand why they needed to burn the house. Was it simply to provoke the police?"
"That's what I think," Xiao Haiyang said without any hesitation. "Before we set out, Dong Xiaoqing sent me a text message saying that she had something to give me. We investigated afterwards and discovered that an unknown individual had stolen Dong Xiaoqing's phone number and sent me a message posing as her. When I went to investigate at the Dong house three days ago, I left a piece of paper with my contact information on it for Dong Xiaoqing. According to the timing, I received the text message right around when the arsonist broke into the Dong house. It's likely the criminal saw my contact information and purposefully lured us there. There's no question that he was attracting the police's attention."
"Besides that, we also investigated the delivery person at that express delivery company who regularly had contact with Dong Qian. This person's whereabouts since Dong Qian's death are unknown," Tao Ran added, pulling out an evidence bag. There was a photocopy of an ID in it. The man in the photograph had a crewcut. His appearance was very unremarkable. He could disappear into a crowd in the blink of an eye. "This is the personal information the vanished delivery person left behind at the company. It's a fake. The company's management has been a mess for a while. They must have just taken a look at the ID without verifying it and then simply employed him."
Luo Wenzhou looked at Fei Du. "What's your professional opinion?"
Fei Du cleared his throat, closed the notebook he'd been pretending to take notes in, and said, "One person ran over Dong Xiaoqing at Heng'ai Hospital. At the same time, another person set fire to the Dong family's house. And before that, there was also a mysterious express delivery person who got in touch with Dong Qian. They know how to fake IDs. They have a certain level of technology. To put it another way—there may be more than three criminals involved in this case. They have planning and they have technology. It's likely an organized criminal gang."
As Fei Du spoke, he very calmly stood up. Really looking rather like a scholar, he pulled over a whiteboard and drew a circle with a marker. "For a gang, the simpler their goal is, the more unified they are, so it's easier for them to assemble. For example, mutual benefit. On top of that mutual benefit, they'll frequently employ methods of force or brainwashing to make their members stay loyal—"
"For example, the drug trafficking gang, and Su Xiaolan and the others' chain to kidnap and market children," Tao Ran picked up.
"Right. Even an international terrorist organization carrying the banner of so-called extremist beliefs still has behind it a complicated economic background and a chain of interests." Fei Du smiled. "It's very hard to tie a group of people together relying solely on psychopathy. After all, being a psychopath is a very individual experience."
"Concretely?" said Luo Wenzhou.
"For example, among those who all target the police, there are psychopaths who want to challenge the police force's intelligence, psychopaths who only want to kill policemen, and also psychopaths who want to have some sorts of indescribable relations with people in uniform…"
Everyone was coaxed into laughter. Luo Wenzhou laughed dryly, interrupting the increasingly improper Fei Du. He picked up the notebook Fei Du had just shut and put it into the desk. "Shut up. We're holding a meeting, be a little more serious!"
Fei Du seriously changed the subject. "These sorts of particular differences will lead to instability among a gang, making it very hard to form an orderly organization.—Therefore, Officer Xiao, plotting Zhou Junmao's assassination, inciting Dong Xiaoqing, then killing her and setting fire to her house to get rid of the evidence—this whole series of events has as its only motive to provoke the police? I personally think that isn't very realistic."
Tao Ran said, "So your conclusion is…"
"Plotting to assassinate Zhou Junmao, sending something to Dong Xiaoqing, and lighting the fire for the police to see—this series of events either wasn't all done by the same group, or there was another reason. It's not very likely it was simply aimed at the police. Finding out what's actually going on will have to wait until we've had a chat with Zhou Huaijin."
Xiao Haiyang didn't make a sound.
Fei Du looked him. "Actually, I think Officer Xiao's train of thought is very interesting. When a criminal does something incomprehensible, the average person will think that they're doing it to cover something up. Why do you think so firmly that it was to provoke the police?"
"Because Dong Qian died, too," Xiao Haiyang said suddenly. "You've silently acknowledged the part about Dong Qian assassinating Zhou Junmao, but what if he was also a victim from a certain point of view? 'For matters the police can't resolve, give the victims an opportunity to take a tooth for a tooth.'—Haven't there been cases of vigilanteism like that…"
Xiao Haiyang suddenly noticed that he'd said too much and tightly shut his mouth.
Luo Wenzhou and Fei Du's gazes fell on him simultaneously. The conference room temporarily quieted.
Luo Wenzhou looked deeply at Xiao Haiyang. "Fei Du is coming with me to see Zhou Huaijin. Tao Ran, try to find the mysterious delivery person based on the information and the photograph on the fake ID. Apart from that, keep searching the security cameras around Dong Xiaoqing's house to track down the arsonist's trail. It's likely this person changed his clothes after leaving the scene. Take note of his height and distinguishing characteristics.—Meeting adjourned."
Fei Du's gaze swept the place where he'd sat, not finding the notebook he'd just been holding, and he was feeling somewhat suspicious when he heard someone behind him give a "Hey!" He turned his head. Luo Wenzhou opened the notebook and smacked it facedown against Fei Du's chest.
The page it was open to was the one Fei Du had been on while pretending to take notes during the meeting. Actually, he'd been scrawling idly—
It was a profile sketch of Luo Wenzhou sitting next to him with his chin in his hand.