In Yan City's Ping'an District, the police station on Ping'an Road received a report from the central hotline. There was a very old apartment building in their jurisdiction that had originally been an office building. It had been out of repair for many years, and the rent and housing prices were very cheap, so it was very welcome among out-of-towners and those looking for cheap housing. People came and went; the composition of the residents was very complicated. They were always having disputes.
One household had smelled an indescribable stench for several days in a row. There was a pregnant woman in the household who couldn't stand the stink. Her family determined that the stink was coming from next door and proceeded to go open negotiations, but no one answered the door of that apartment. The pregnant woman's family then went to the building's hardly better than nonexistent property management. The property management did a search and discovered that that apartment had been rented out and the tenant hadn't left any contact information. The owner's number had been disconnected long ago.
The irate pregnant woman's family thought that the property management was being deliberately inactive and wanted to break down the door. The two sides began to fight, and in the end the police were alerted.
The Ping'an Road police station dispatched two civil policemen who were experts at resolving neighborhood disputes. As soon as they arrived, before they had time to engage their dispute resolution function, the crappy apartment's door met another fierce kick from the pregnant woman's family member and, at this critical juncture, the door shaft gave out a crack and collapsed, coming to a tragic end.
It was as if the seal had been broken on a stink that could have served as a "biochemical crisis"; it nearly knocked everyone at the door flat. One of the old civil policemen thought he'd smelled this before and suddenly remembered something. His expression altered. He ordered everyone not to go in. He got out shoe coverings and a truncheon, then carefully searched through the apartment, finally pulling open the door of the fridge—
Three hours later, the City Bureau's police cars were occupying the lot in front of the apartment building.
While Luo Wenzhou was still lame, he had already become accustomed to peacefully coexisting with his "third leg." According to what he said himself, he'd have no problem climbing up to lift off a roof or going underground to catch a thief; going to a crime scene was easy.
He held his crutch horizontally behind him, as if carrying a big sword in a game on his back, firmly planted on one leg in front of the fridge, leaning forward to examine their dear friend inside.
There was a man's corpse in the fridge.
It had gotten cold early this winter. All of Yan City's districts were turning their heating on early. Because no one had been paying the bills, the electricity in this apartment had been shut off about a month before. The early heat had piled on top of the stopped refrigeration, the temperature had risen rapidly, and the corpse had had a "centennial conference" with the many different varieties of mold in the fridge, producing a fantastic biochemical reaction.
Lang Qiao had wanted to go support Luo Wenzhou. She persisted for half a minute, nearly went into shock, and fled from the battle, running to the door and clamoring, "Boss, do you have sinusitis?"
"Between his work and his daily life, what kind of rotting substances hasn't a police officer who's familiar with the kitchen seen? The ignorant are easily surprised," Luo Wenzhou said without looking back, then waved a hand at the medical examiner. "Enough, I'm done looking. Take it away."
"Captain Luo." Tao Ran passed him a folder. "Look, this was found under the pillow of the victim's camp bed."
Luo Wenzhou put on gloves and took it.—This was a very ordinary folder. There were only a few thin sheets of paper inside. Each sheet had a photograph stuck to it, with the name, sex, home address, and other basic information of the person in the photograph next to it. In the corner there was a clearly indicated date, and a number of unclear meaning. Some had been printed, some had been written by hand. The handwriting was very heavy, with incorrectly written characters throughout.
Dong Xiaoqing's photograph suddenly registered—it was on the first page. An X had been drawn over the photograph in red pen. Because of this, the case had come to the City Bureau right away.
A criminal policeman next to them looked over. "Why does this look like an elementary school student's handwriting?"
"An overdeveloped 'elementary school student' who kills for a living." Tao Ran's line of sight went all around the room—this was a studio apartment. Aside from the bathroom, there was only one room, with no distinction between living room and bedroom. The surroundings were very crude.
A refrigerator that had been used to hide a body, a cloth couch so dirty you couldn't tell its original color, a short-legged coffee table, an old-style cabinet, a TV covered in dust, and a simple camp bed were all its furnishings.
There were some opened up yellowing publications, a poker set, and some mercury loaded dice piled on the couch. There was a stack of beer bottles and used take-out containers in a corner, also smelling from the heat, though their stench paled in comparison to that of the master of the house.
In a suitcase at the bottom of the cabinet, aside from a clean change of clothes, there were also quite a few tools for committing crimes: rubber gloves, a head covering, rain boots, tarpaulin, illegal cutting tools, an iron hammerhead, an iron club, a taser, and some common lock picking tools. In the middle of the cabinet some neat stacks of hundred yuan bills were displayed. At a glance, there was between one and two hundred thousand, laid out in a circle as an offering to a kindly-faced porcelain Buddha.
"Lang Big-eyes, don't you like 'Léon?'" Luo Wenzhou said to Lang Qiao. "Here's a locally produced 'Léon,' come and pay your respects."
"Seeing as you're my boss, I can pretend I didn't hear that," Lang Qiao said darkly. "I can't live under the same sky as those who insult the man of my dreams."
Luo Wenzhou sneered at this unscrupulous woman who didn't even dare to raise her voice to defend the man of her dreams, then turned to Xiao Haiyang. "Who was he?"
"This is the ID card from his wallet. Wang Xincheng, male, thirty-nine, but I just looked it up, and the ID card is a fake. The picture doesn't match the identity information." Xiao Haiyang gave the realistic fake ID to Luo Wenzhou. The man in the photograph had a crewcut and unprepossessing features. His eyes stared directly ahead of him; perhaps it was a psychological effect, but he seemed unusually fierce and malicious.
"Those who need fake IDs generally all have records. It's likely he's an escaped criminal," said Luo Wenzhou. "Go to the database and compare—"
Xiao Haiyang hastily gave an affirmative.
"Captain Luo, there's 120,000 yuan altogether in the cabinet." Tao Ran had very quickly counted up the cash being offered to the Buddha. "That's the number written next to the date on the page with Dong Xiaoqing's materials. It must have been the money that bought her life. The date on the last take-out receipt is the day before Dong Xiaoqing's death. If this is the killer who ran over Dong Xiaoqing, it's likely he died right after getting the money. These sorts of criminals all live in the moment. Even though he was offering it to the Buddha, it must only have been for one night."
"He'd just silenced her when he was silenced himself." Luo Wenzhou sighed. "Over a month has gone by. If only the Ping'an District's saved security camera footage hasn't been deleted yet… Go investigate. If there's nothing, then try to collect something from the civilian security cameras in the area… There'll be clues."
Tao Ran could hear that he was implying something and looked up to exchange a look with him. Luo Wenzhou shook his head towards him, gaze falling again on the weapons inside the cabinet—the head covering and the rubber gloves were of a very familiar style; he could recognize at a glance that they'd been worn by the killer who'd brushed past him in the car with the smashed windshield.
Luo Wenzhou tapped the ground with his crutch, slowly walking out of the reeking crime scene. He had a premonition—this was the "key evidence" they'd been waiting for.
Luo Wenzhou turned out to have made a prophecy.
A few days later, using the photograph and DNA, Xiao Haiyang found the true identity of "Wang Xincheng" in the database of wanted criminals. This person's original name was "Wang Li." He'd been a long-haul truck driver who'd fallen behind on a debt because of a gambling addiction, then out of desperation had stabbed his creditor and his whole family, then fled into the night. He'd been put on the wanted list by the local police; they hadn't known that he'd been engaging in a business that required no assets ever since.
The medical examiners confirmed that Wang Li had died of poisoning. His stomach contained the remains of beer; their conjecture was that he'd been entirely off guard and drunk beer with a powerful poison mixed into it. There were traces of poison and beer on the ground; the victim must have knocked over the beer bottle as he struggled. But no beer mixed with poison had been found on the scene.
Apart from this, the police found a kettle in Wang Li's apartment, half-filled, but there were no hot water vessels in the apartment.
That meant that someone had come knocking on Wang Li's door, likely bringing money, and had met with a very polite reception. Wang Li had not only drunk the poisoned beer, he'd even poured him a cup of hot water.
This person, holding the cup, had looked on coldly as the idiotic killer had been poisoned and fallen to the ground, struggled helplessly, then stopped breathing altogether.
Then, he'd stuffed the body into the fridge—this way, the time the body was found would be greatly delayed, and a lot of the evidence would have vanished over time—and taken away the bottle containing the poisoned beer and the cup he'd touched in order to dispose of them, coming and going without a trace. By the time the body was discovered, he'd have made a clean getaway.
Perfect.
If not for the fact that that idiot Wang Li had left a "manifest" under his pillow…and if that unfortunate porcelain cup hadn't had a lid.
The cup's lid had fallen to the ground along with the beer bottle during Wang Li's struggle. The cheap product hadn't held up; the lid had broken to pieces. While the poisoner had carefully taken the shards away, he'd unfortunately been in too much of a hurry and hadn't noticed that there was still a piece under the couch.
And on it just happened to be Zheng Kaifeng's fingerprint.
At this point, all the evidence had unhurriedly, systematically arranged itself in front of the police, as if there was an invisible hand personally tying together the sequence of cause and effect—
Starting from thirty-eight years ago, when Zheng Kaifeng and Zhou Junmao had murdered Zhou Yahou to accumulate their bloody starting capital.
Twenty-one years ago, in order to make a domestic advance, the Zhou Clan had played the same old trick; in the process, the innocent Dong Qian and his wife had been pulled in. Dong Qian had suffered the loss of his loved one, but he had always been in the dark, living an ordinary life amidst inescapable grief; but his name had been entered on the devil's list.
Then, Zheng Kaifeng and Zhou Junmao had finally passed through the golden stage of partners with mutual interests pulling together and entered the stage of sharing the same bed with different dreams.
At this stage, perhaps because the time had been ripe, perhaps because there had been internal strife between the two of them, Zheng Kaifeng had once more pulled up the foreshadowing buried twenty-one years before, using Yang Bo, who'd thought he was Zhou Junmao's illegitimate son, coordinating with him to kill the Zhou Clan's illustrious leader.
Zhou Junmao's death had been like a stone exciting thousands of waves, making the crown princes, real and fake, each with their own axe to grind, get into a farce of a tug-of-war. He'd originally thought he could slowly reel in the net, not expecting the "knife" Dong Qian to slip up.
Dong Xiaoqing had tried to assassinate Zhou Huaijin and mistakenly killed Zhou Huaixin; the killer had hastily silenced her, and the police had interrogated Zhou Huaijin that day.
As if heaven's net had wide meshes but nothing escaped it, the twenty-one-year-old secret had been unexpectedly revealed, exposed under the bright light of day.
Zheng Kaifeng had caught wind and run. He'd taken cash and knocked on the door of the killer who'd assassinated Dong Xiaoqing, murdering the murderer with a poisoned cup. Then he'd gone to pick up Yang Bo, wanting to slip away, not expecting that he'd run into a police ambush downstairs at the hotel. Zheng Kaifeng had come to a dead end and used his final trick—mutual destruction.
It only took four steps to get from "mutual interests" to "mutual destruction"; this was the sequence among normal partners, and it turned out that abnormal partners couldn't act any differently.
Following the discovery of Wang Li's body, it appeared that all the key figures in this business had died off, and the remaining trivialities—such as who had been the mysterious delivery person making express deliveries to Dong Qian, the biker following Dong Xiaoqing, and never mind who'd set Dong Xiaoqing's house on fire, there was also the moron who'd sent the text provoking the police—all those answers had died with those concerned. They could only put them down as "Zheng Kaifeng's subordinates," like the private bodyguards they'd snatched from Zheng Kaifeng's truck.
A rest had been drawn over these six heavy lives.
These six lives, like six icebergs, had simultaneously struck the Zhou Clan, that multinational Titanic. Murder, money-laundering, international crime… The legend of an era was facing the setting sun, dismally sinking into the era's boundless sea.
Fei Du took his phone off speaker and said to Tao Ran, who had been telling him the progress of the case over the phone, "Thank you, ge. I understand."
Over the course of a month, Fei Du had gone from being entirely unable to move to being able to move half his body. While walking upright was still rather a problem, at least he could sit up and say a few sentences.
After the nurse's aides had been dispersed, Fei Du received a caller at the hospital—Zhou Huaijin seemed to be in an even sorrier state than Fei Du, who'd nearly been blown to smithereens. He sat next to him rather stiffly; having finished listening to the sequence of cause and effect, he sat dumbly where he was, not speaking for a long time.
"That's roughly how it went." Fei Du was sitting in a wheelchair, leaning forward. "Mr. Zhou, you may be sick of hearing this, but I'll say it again. You have my condolences."
Zhou Huaijin squeezed his eyes shut.
Fei Du's gaze passed through his rimless lenses, calmly peeling Zhou Huaijin down to the bone. "Actually, there's something I don't really understand. Why did Zheng Kaifeng wait so long to kill your esteemed father?"
"Zhou…" When Zhou Huaijin opened his mouth, his voice came out very hoarse. He hurriedly cleared his throat. "Zhou Junmao's health had always been very good, but at last year's physical exam, they found a shadow in his chest. Though it later turned out to be a false alarm, it had been a bit of a shock to him. He brought up making a will many times in the last year—Huaixin must have told you."
Zhou Huaixin really had babbled something about that when he'd called the police. Fei Du nodded lightly.
Zhou Huaijin laughed bitterly. "He wouldn't acknowledge me, wouldn't leave me a penny. The legacy would naturally have gone to Huaixin. You knew Huaixin. He was pretty clever, but he didn't have it in him to take over a business—especially not one that was partly illegal."
There was no need for him to go on. Fei Du already understood.—In his later years, Zhou Junmao had finally remembered that he had a good-for-nothing son and known he absolutely couldn't handle the complicated Zhou Clan, so he'd wanted to clean up his estate for Zhou Huaixin, gradually exit from some not-so-legal spheres.
He'd betrayed Zheng Kaifeng, who'd crawled out of the mud with him.
Zhou Huaijin looked down and rubbed his eyes. He stood up to bid farewell. "Thank you, President Fei. I won't disturb your rest anymore…"
Fei Du interrupted him. "What are your plans for the future?"
Zhou Huaijin smiled bitterly. "Plans are out of the question. I still have to go back and cooperate in your investigation of the Zhou Clan."
"You didn't have decision-making powers, and you didn't participate. Strictly speaking, you're also one of the victims," said Fei Du. "Set your mind at ease. Under ordinary circumstances, you won't be implicated."
Zhou Huaijin said, "Many thanks for your blessing."
"But I still have some other misgivings." Fei Du tapped lightly on the arm of the wheelchair with his uninjured arm. "Zhou-xiong—you don't mind if I call you that? I suddenly thought that all your family's tragedy, you and your brother's…your esteemed mother's, it all stems from Zhou Junmao inexplicably believing without having done a paternity test that you weren't his biological son. I haven't been able to understand this."
Zhou Huaijin stared.
"Apart from that, there are still many suspicious points about this case. Never mind the details, the most unfathomable thing is this—Zhou-xiong, you've known Zheng Kaifeng since you were little. Do you think he's the sort of 'martyr' who'd blow himself up when he'd come to the end of the line?"
Zhou Huaijin said, "You mean…"
"And then there's Yang Bo," said Fei Du. "All of you thought Yang Bo wasn't especially useful and constantly questioned how he'd gotten the post of secretary. What was it Zheng Kaifeng liked about a person of such average abilities? He had to bring him along when he murdered Zhou Junmao, and when he fled into the night? Don't you think that's very strange?"
As he spoke, Zhou Huaijin opened his bloodshot eyes wide.
"We can only investigate this far here. Our reach really doesn't extend to all the transactions that happened abroad." Fei Du looked deeply at Zhou Huaijin, speaking one word at a time. "Zhou-xiong, have you considered what happens if there's someone else behind this? If Zheng Kaifeng was a chess piece in all of it?"
Zhou Huaijin was looking at him in shock.
"You have my contact information.—Also, I've thought all along that what your esteemed mother kept locked up in that safety deposit box couldn't just have been a package of heart medication to terrorize Zhou Junmao with. What do you think?" Fei Du gently blinked at him, lowering his voice. "I hope Huaixin can rest in peace. I liked his paintings. Go on, I'll see you out."
Zhou Huaijin, his soul elsewhere, left the hospital, having no attention to spare to tell the half-incapacitated patient not to see him out. Fei Du watched him get into his car; his lips finally displayed a somewhat cold smile.
He slowly turned the motor-powered wheelchair, slowly and thoughtfully gliding back to his hospital room…and saw a lady at the door.
She was evidently of advanced years, but that didn't at all stop her from being pleasing to the eye. She was dressed in a dark gray raffia tweed suit. Fei Du couldn't help looking in admiration at the small silk kerchief around her neck. Her figure could still be called fair and graceful.
The woman held a box of food and flowers for visiting a patient, and she was looking into Fei Du's hospital room.
Fei Du suspected she had gone to the wrong room, and thereupon slowly glided over in his motor-powered wheelchair and greeted her. "Hello."
The woman turned her head when she heard him and looked him over, her eyes widening slightly.
Youthful beauties were common, but middle-aged beauties were rare.
Fei Du involuntarily opened his playboy barrage. Gently pushing at his glasses, he urbanely said, "Young lady, have you lost your way visiting a patient?"
Seeming stunned by being called a "young lady," she didn't make a sound.
"With you standing there, I feel my hospital room is about to light up." Fei Du pushed the wheelchair into the room and handed her a flower someone had given him. "I'm rather familiar with the inpatient department here. Where are you going? Can I see you there?"