"Letting your mind wander during a meeting?" Luo Wenzhou lowered his voice, poking Fei Du's shoulder. "You've had enough to eat and drink now, and your blood sugar isn't low, right? Disgraceful."
Fei Du hadn't deliberately evaded anyone when he'd been drawing. He very easily took the notebook and flipped through it. He spread his hands. "Where did the other one go? Shixiong, why'd you rip out a page of my notebook?"
With justice on his side, Luo Wenzhou said, "I confiscated it."
Then he restrained his smile and opened the door of the interrogation room.
The sound of them coming in the door startled Zhou Huaijin. He looked up emptily at Luo Wenzhou. In less than a day, this person had gone from a youthful genius whose age couldn't be seen at all to a haggard-faced middle-aged man with drooping eyes. For women and men alike, a bright and shiny sack of skin was this fragile; if just a bit of vigor vanished like smoke, the body would be past its freshness date in the blink of an eye.
Before Luo Wenzhou could speak, Zhou Huaijin broke the silence. He said hoarsely, "Can you show me the results of the paternity test?"
Luo Wenzhou froze, but a folder was passed over from behind him—Fei Du seemed to have expected that he would ask for this. He was prepared. "Yours, Huaixin's, and Yang Bo's are all there."
Zhou Huaijin took a deep breath and spent a full minute just opening that thin folder, as if he was opening the tragedy of his life, his hands shaking dreadfully.
Fei Du altered his earlier slightly malicious bearing, giving him a fresh glass of warm water. "Wet your throat before we chat. I think President Zhou is a man of faith? According to your views, people have souls. Huaixin's worries haven't passed, and he must not have gone far. Don't make him see you unwell."
For a person experiencing extreme grief, this sort of kindly advice was simply a powerful means of provoking tears. Past the end of his endurance, Zhou Huaijin let out a sob, his whole body shaking for a long time. He took the tissue Fei Du gave him and wiped his face. "I'll tell you whatever I can. What other questions do you have? Do you want the identities of the people who helped me fake the kidnapping?"
"President Hu has already given up those details," Luo Wenzhou said. "Mr. Zhou, I don't know whether you've heard. Dong Xiaoqing, the killer who murdered your little brother, was hit by a car and died not long after escaping from Heng'ai Hospital."
Zhou Huaijin's expression congealed for a moment. Coldly, he said, "Really? That's really too good for her."
"The person who hit her did it deliberately," Luo Wenzhou added, gaze fixed on his expression.
Zhou Huaijin backed up, crossing his arms in front of his chest, adopting a very defensive posture. "If I'd done such a thing, I hope I would have done it myself."
"President Zhou," said Fei Du, "why was Dong Xiaoqing silenced shortly after committing the crime? Evidently someone was afraid she would say something after being arrested. Though she was the killer, she was only a knife. Don't you want to know who was holding that knife?"
Zhou Huaijin's cheeks immediately tensed.
"No matter what, Dong Xiaoqing is dead," Fei Du continued. "However much you hate her, however much you want to hack her to pieces, it's no use. Even if you could drag her out to flog her corpse, she still wouldn't feel anything. Are you reconciled?"
Zhou Huaijin's feelings were instantly aroused. He looked at Fei Du, his eyes bloodshot. After a long time, he asked, "What do you want?"
"Of the questions I asked you before, there's one you still haven't answered," Fei Du said. "Why haven't you asked the reason Dong Xiaoqing wanted to kill you? Do you know something? Did you know Dong Xiaoqing?"
"I didn't know her," said Zhou Huaijin. "I'd never seen her before. At least if I'd suspected there was something wrong with her, I wouldn't have had the bodyguards let her in when she approached."
Fei Du nodded. "So you remembered something later."
Zhou Huaijin must have been parched. He picked up the water Fei Du had poured him and drank it in one gulp. "I really have done some dishonorable things, but Huaixin was innocent in all of this, from beginning to end. If you can get justice for him, I don't care if the Zhou Clan goes bankrupt and becomes worthless here and now, whether I'm the genuine heir or not—Mr. Fei, you understand what I mean."
Fei Du weighed his words and expression. Like a nimbly-reacting chameleon, he at once accordingly adjusted the tempo and tone of his speech, very directly saying, "I understand. I profited off your company at a precarious moment. It seems you didn't take offense, so I won't apologize."
Zhou Huaijin looked up at the ceiling, the lights mercilessly jabbing his pupils. He seemed to hesitate, not knowing where to start. Only after a good while did he say, "Have you had a positive outcome in your investigation of the Zhou Clan's public welfare funds suspected of money laundering? If you haven't found anything, please look a little closer. There must be something there. Unfortunately they always defended against me, not letting me near the related business, so I have no evidence now. But I know that the Zhou Clan isn't a bunch of Buddhist devotees. They didn't only use legal means when building the family fortune."
Luo Wenzhou asked, "Are you talking about Zhou Junmao being suspected of murdering Zhou Yahou?"
"Not only that." Zhou Huaijin shook his head. "It's not only that thing. 'Steal a hook, and they hang you; steal the whole country, and they make you a prince.' The Zhou Clan's general headquarters are abroad, the waters are deep. After so many years of success and fame, there are many things there's no way to investigate. In the midst of the shock after Dong Xiaoqing struck, I remembered something. Many years ago, my life intersected with hers… This has to do with Zheng Kaifeng.
"You must know Zheng Kaifeng's origins by now—he started out as an underling for a human smuggler, and afterwards joined up with Zhou Junmao and went around everywhere in the style of a successful personage, but actually inferior people are always inferior. They can never change what's in their bones. To this day he hasn't learned how to stand up as a civilized human being."
The corner of Fei Du's eye twitched lightly, and the tip of his pen paused briefly on the page.
But Zhou Huaijin was wholly unaware, entirely sunk into his recollections. He went on, "This must have been…over twenty years ago, shortly after Huaixin was born. My mother's postpartum depression was becoming more serious. She was nearly a madwoman with no way to communicate. She had no attention to spare for him, so I moved his crib into my room and kept him with me every day."
Luo Wenzhou looked him over. "I've heard that a little whelp who howls every night can bring new parents to the point of collapse for quite a few years. Mr. Zhou was very patient from a young age. Couldn't your family afford a nanny to take care of a small child?"
"There aren't many young men in the world who would sincerely like a baby. I was only afraid." Zhou Huaijin gently closed his eyes and took a deep breath, reaching out a hand towards Luo Wenzhou. "Could you give me a cigarette? Thank you.—The fact that I could survive right under Zhou Junmao's nose relied entirely on my mother's protection, but her mental and physical state were getting worse by the day then. I was desperate. Looking at her every day, I saw my fate hanging in the balance. Huaixin was a straw I clutched at randomly. I hardly left him during that time. Sometimes I even crushed up my food and fed him a mouthful or two. I thought that no matter what Zhou Junmao wanted to do, he'd have scruples about doing anything to his own child.
"Huaixin had wet the bed that night. He was howling. I got up in a blur to change his diapers. When I'd taken off the old ones, I found that there weren't any new ones, and was going to go to the storage room to get some…but I found that the lights were on in the study on the first floor, and Zhou Junmao, who had been away from home for several days, was having a secret meeting with Zheng Kaifeng inside.
"At the time, the conglomerate's main strategy was directed at East Asia. The Zhou Clan wanted to take advantage of the country encouraging foreign investments to seize the market and get cheap labor. Zheng Kaifeng personally took the helm in this. His suitcase was at the door then. He must just have gotten off a plane. If Huaixin hadn't been waiting, when I saw the two of them, I definitely would have turned back and run for it, but there was nothing I could do. I had to stay as quiet as I could and pass by the study, creeping towards the storage room, but just then I heard Zheng Kaifeng say, 'Dead as a doornail, don't worry, there's absolutely no trace…' That sort of thing."
At this point, Zhou Huaijin paused and put his hands to his forehead, pressed hard on his temples, a took a deep breath. "When you live each moment in fear for your life, you know the feeling, you'll be especially sensitive towards certain key terms—as soon as I heard the word 'dead,' before I had time to put it together with its context, my first thought was that they were going to kill me. I was so scared my hands and feet turned cold and I froze in place.
"Then I heard Zhou Junmao say, 'I saw the news. It seems there was a little accident.' Then Zheng Kaifeng said, 'You mean Dong? There's no need to worry about him, he doesn't know anything. He wasn't looking where he was going and got tangled up. It's his bad luck.' Zhou Junmao laughed and said, 'There's nothing in the world money won't buy. It doesn't matter if it's a little expensive, as long as it saves trouble.'"
"Wait a minute," Luo Wenzhou said suddenly. "Mr. Zhou, could you give me an exact time? When was this?"
It had been more than twenty years, after all. The fact that Zhou Huaijin could roughly repeat the words was the contribution of his extreme terror and racing adrenaline at the time. It was really very hard for him to remember other details immediately; he involuntarily frowned slightly.
Fei Du examined his weary face and rhythmically tapped the wooden table with his pen cap. "President Zhou, studying and working during the day and taking care of a small child at night is difficult even for an adult. You must still have been in school then. Did he have an impact on your performance? Were you sleepy during class?"
"I was all right, my classwork wasn't serious, only basic courses every afternoon…" Zhou Huaijin blurted an answer. At this point, he seemed to catch the distant tail of his memories. "Right, that was business school—I was attending business school at the time. I was seventeen. It was my first year."
That was twenty-one years ago.
"You said the door of the study wasn't closed," Fei Du continued. "Then it must not have been winter and cold, nor summer, when you would need the air-conditioning on?"
"Right! It wasn't cold or warm then. If it wasn't September, then it was October.—My mom's mental state was fragile. Once night fell, no one would casually move around in the house, and most of the people employed in the house didn't understand Chinese, so they dared to talk with the door open."
Luo Wenzhou exchanged a look with Fei Du, then looked down and sent Tao Ran a text message: "September or October twenty-one years ago, did something happen to the Zhou Clan or the Dong family?"
Tao Ran's voice quickly came through his earpiece. "It did, I was just going to tell you. On September 16th of that year, Dong Xiaoqing's mother died in a car crash."
The corner of Luo Wenzhou's eye twitched—the date of Zhou Junmao's death in a car crash was also the sixteenth, the first day Fei Du had "taken up his post!"
"When I'd heard up to that point, I didn't dare to linger any longer and quickly ran. But I always remembered that event. Information wasn't flourishing then. It wasn't easy if you were abroad and wanted to know domestic news. I saw a checked luggage tag on Zheng Kaifeng's luggage and saw that the abbreviation for the city of destination was Yan City, so I secretly found a friend I trusted who was studying abroad in China and asked her to help me find information related to Yan City, the surname Dong, and unusual death."
Luo Wenzhou looked down and read through the old news articles his colleagues outside had sent to his phone. "Did you find the news that a well-known Chinese businessman had died in a car crash?"
"Yes. Three months later, the company he'd built up on his own was acquired by a foreign investor. The source of the foreign investment was a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands by the Zhou Clan." Zhou Huaijin spread his hands and said, "You see, when a murderer kills someone and receives no punishment, when he acts for the second time, he'll be even more ruthless. To draw an inappropriate analogy, it's like someone who cheats at games will develop a habit of cheating generally. Two hooligans became famous entrepreneurs and succeeded in entering polite society by killing one Zhou Yahou. If they killed another roadblock, they'd succeed in taking over his domestic network, making an advance of ten years at once—while foreign investments were being encouraged at the time, the truly good projects wouldn't go to companies that weren't on their home soil. President Fei, you've had some contact with business. Do you know how much it costs to accumulate the connections needed to compete with local trademarks in a strange place?"
Fei Du sighed. "I also know that buying a truck driver who just happens to be looking for death can't be done for any amount of money. Your honored father was the sort of person who'd flip the chessboard if he couldn't win."
"That woman…the one named Dong." Zhou Huaijin covered his eyes with his hand. In a rather weak voice, he said, "When she struck, she said something, only I heard it…and Huaixin."
"What did she say?"
"She said, 'One wasn't enough? Why couldn't you let even my dad go?'"
Luo Wenzhou frowned. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know. She seemed to think that by some means I'd used that responsible driver's…her father's desire for revenge to bring about Zhou Junmao's car crash." Zhou Huaijin shook his head. "But my capabilities really aren't that great. If Zhou Junmao's death really was deliberate, I recommend you go to Zheng Kaifeng."
Luo Wenzhou frowned, suddenly remembering what Dong Xiaoqing had said to him before her death.
"He's one of those people, too…"
If Dong Xiaoqing's mother's death hadn't been an accident but a conspiracy—then the responsible driver and the target both dying on the scene was exactly the same circumstance as in Zhou Junmao's car crash.
Could they be a group of "road assassins" who didn't stint to give up their own lives to take another's?
Was there a "death fleet" under Yan City's bright daylight?
Luo Wenzhou stood up at once. "Bring Zheng Kaifeng in."
Tao Ran had been listening in on Zhou Huaijin's interrogation. "Wait a minute, Dong Xiaoqing thought that Zhou Huaijin was the killer behind the scenes? I don't quite understand, why would she think that?"
"That depends on how much information was in the mysterious package she received. For example, did she know that Zhou Huaijin plotted his own kidnapping, that Yang Bo wasn't the Zhou Clan's illegitimate son at all, that Zheng Kaifeng and Zhou Junmao had conspired together at the car crash twenty years ago?" Fei Du, coming out of the interrogation room, put in a word. "When Zhou Huaixin called the police, he made a lot of noise and talked a lot of nonsense to stir things up. Among that, he said he thought that someone had divulged Zhou Junmao's itinerary and the make and model of the car he was riding in to pull Dong Qian into the rumor that this was a power struggle between the wealthy involving an assassination. For Dong Qian to succeed in his suicidal attack, there must have been someone inside the Zhou Clan who was in touch with him, collecting that information for him. Who do you think that person is most likely to be?"
Lang Qiao said, "Also, no one in Zhou Huaijin's family knew he was actually Zhou Junmao's biological son. Is it possible that's the result of someone's deliberate misdirection? For example, when Zhou Huaijin was little, it's possible his parents simply weren't sure, and there were always people saying that the child looked like Mr. Wang from next door—after all, Zhou Huaijin really doesn't look like Zhou Junmao. Then there was a 'friend' who came over to say that there was a new technology that could make a paternity determination, but with as big a conglomerate as the Zhou Clan, it definitely wouldn't do to make a big fuss about that kind of thing and give people a show, so they could only do it privately, in secret. The 'friend' volunteered to help—just like Zhou Huaijin framing Yang Bo…"
Just then, the phone rang wildly, interrupting Lang Qiao. For some reason, she had a foreboding feeling at the moment she picked up. "Hello?"
From the other end came the voice of one of the criminal policemen who had been set to follow Zheng Kaifeng. "Qiao'er, tell the boss, Zheng Kaifeng's run for it!"