"The boy Feng Bin was at a crossroads near the Drum Tower. He waited there about five minutes, and then Xia Xiaonan came." In the Criminal Investigation Team's little conference room, Lang Qiao opened a segment of security camera footage taken from the Gulou District, near the place where the crime had occurred.
"Just the two of them? Where are the others?" Luo Wenzhou came close to watch the security camera footage. "Wait, pause it, look at what Feng Bin has in his hand."
Lang Qiao paused the recording and enlarged a part of it. Though it was night and there were few sources of light, through the high-definition camera, you could still clearly that Feng Bin was holding a plastic bag with a supermarket logo on it, and there were some snacks and drinks inside.
They had all been adolescents; they knew at a glance what was going on with these two—the boy had found an excuse to leave first and waited for the girl at a prearranged spot so the two of them could get away from their classmates' lines of sight without anyone being the wiser and secretly be alone for a while. These half-grown teenagers had gotten together to carry on a half-understood romance; not having as many "important subjects" to rush towards as adults, they would often still have a touch of childhood innocence, like these funny and embarrassing snacks and Western fast foods.
So this was why they had left the others.
"BD Supermarket… I think I remember that's a chain. Go determine how many of them there are in the Gulou District and ask around at each one. The other children are likely nearby." Luo Wenzhou turned his head to deliver orders, then said curiously, "Couldn't they have found a better place for their date in the middle of the night? Why did they have to sneak into the Drum Tower?"
Lang Qiao rolled eyes like ping-pong balls towards him. "Boss, are you a local?"
Luo Wenzhou was perplexed.
"There's a little scenic spot behind the Drum Tower called Lovers' Mirror. It's actually just a big polished stone. Legend says that if you stand in front of Lovers' Mirror, the reflection will rise to heaven. The goddess's seventh daughter saw Dong Yong in that mirror and fell in love at first sight. The words 'Celestial Beings Bestow Agreement' are printed beside it. When lovers stand in front of Lovers' Mirror, the gods bear witness and they'll be together their whole lives."
Hearing this rumor, which sounded like the kind of insincere propaganda handed out to tourists, Luo Wenzhou snorted derisively. "The Bureau of Civil Affairs isn't enough for you people? You need the Jade Emperor to grant you a certificate, too? What, do you get to buy a house if you collect seven certificates?"
These brazen heterosexuals. Truly, they were never satisfied.
Lang Qiao: "…"
She really was at a loss to understand how a pure and romantic beautiful young girl like her had no boyfriend, but there was actually a man who was willing to take a bit of goods like Luo Wenzhou.
Luo Wenzhou changed the subject. "The Drum Tower is a tourist attraction. They must clear people away when they close up in the evening. So did he get his eye on them when they snuck in?"
"No." Lang Qiao had to get down to business along with him. "The killer started following them at the intersection. Watch—"
She pressed "play" again; the camera at the intersection quietly spread out its line of sight, seeing off the boy and girl who didn't even dare to hold hands.
The tranquil night was silent for a moment. Then a man suddenly appeared on camera.
Seeing him on the screen, Luo Wenzhou was startled—because this killer wasn't anything like the weakling who only dared to attack children that he'd imagined.
At a visual estimate, this person was at least a meter seventy-five tall, with a physique that could be described as healthy and strong. He was no older than forty. There was a cigarette in his mouth when he casually strolled over from the corner to follow Feng Bin and Xia Xiaonan at a moderate distance.
Luo Wenzhou said, "Is there a shot of his face?"
"There is. Another camera caught it. I've printed these out." Lang Qiao handed out some printed screenshots to the colleagues around her.
Luo Wenzhou took one look and was sure that this was without a doubt Lu Guosheng. He'd closely examined the wanted poster from the National Road 327 case only last night; the principal offender's face had made a rather strong impression on him.
Lu Guosheng's eyes weren't quite the same size; when he looked straight ahead, his eyeballs weren't quite aligned. His cheeks were gaunt, his chin long, his features deeply-carved. The left corner of his mouth was a little crooked. The man in the screenshot was thirty-eight or thirty-nine; there were some signs of the passage of time on his face, but the outlines of his features looked the same as before. The changes were small.
You could see that Lu Guosheng had been living comfortably these last fifteen years as a wanted criminal. He hadn't aged much.
Before Luo Wenzhou could speak, Xiao Haiyang was already saying positively, "Yes, that's Lu Guosheng!"
This time, even Lang Qiao have him a strange look.
Luo Wenzhou nodded. "All right, Xiao Qiao. Keep talking."
"The killer followed them to the Drum Tower tourist attraction. To get in without buying a ticket, you have to take the side door. There are some narrow alleys in between. You've seen the place, it's rather out-of-the-way, and it all looks about the same. Very complicated. The killer struck there—you can watch the next part, I don't want to watch it a second time."
Saying so, she put on the next segment of film, turned, and left.
This segment of security camera footage came from a camera on the protective hip-and-gable roof of the Drum Tower. The shot was rather distant. In a little intersection at the edge of the frame, the two teenagers suddenly appeared, fleeing in confusion. There was none of the sweet and peaceful handholding atmosphere left. The boy's back was covered in blood. The girl stumbled as he pulled her, falling to the ground. Though there was no sound in the video, it still clutched at the heart.
The warm moonlight suddenly took on a raw, bloody edge. The teenagers' affectionate but immature emotions had been disrupted by a suddenly appearing evildoer, a turn of events out of a nightmare.
Enduring fear and pain, Feng Bin threw the items he was holding one by one at the human-shaped monster; then, pulling the beloved girl, he ran madly, fleeing by any path.
They called for help as they ran, but the tourist attraction that had been cleared of the public was deserted. Perhaps their luck was bad and there was no one to hear, or perhaps the patrolmen had heard the cries for help and were afraid of bringing trouble on themselves, hiding further away instead of going over to help.
The human-shaped monster's footsteps were already right behind them; as they cried out to heaven and earth in the empty streets, neither heaven nor earth answered.
The Drum Tower, full of man-made romance, cast down its cold gaze. At this critical juncture, Feng Bin in his panic lost his way in the intricate little alleys. The two of them, turning this way and that, circled back to where they'd started from.
Running right into the knife-wielding killer!
Everyone in the conference room broke out in cold sweat as they watched this scene. Someone even jumped up and hit the corner of the table.
Holding on to Xia Xiaonan, Feng Bin turned and ran. He saw a guard booth not far off. As if seeing the light of dawn, the boy ran desperately towards it, hitting the window of the booth.
Somebody, anybody, come help them…
But his last hope very soon turned to hopelessness—there was no one in the guard booth.
The criminal was now in front of them, the bloody knife less than fifty meters away. Xia Xiaonan's face was as pale as death with fright; Feng Bin, in his panic, chose the worst possible path.
The alley where the murder had happened was a dead end street!
What they found after they ran into the little alley wasn't caught on camera.
About half an hour later, Lu Guosheng left the little alley. He took off his jacket, put it on inside-out to cover up the bloodstains, and very calmly walked away.
There was dead silence in the conference room.
Lang Qiao had her back to the screen. "Have you finished?"
Someone whispered, "I'm going to throw up. This is a horror film."
"So Lu Guosheng chased two children into a dead end street, then killed one and left the other behind. Why?" Luo Wenzhou spoke first to break the strange atmosphere. "We saw the scene of the crime. Those two garbage bins were the only place where a person could hide. The children were scared out of their wits and made two fatal mistakes; running into the dead end street was one of them. The girl had no way out; hiding in the garbage bin was the only thing she could do—think about it, if you were the killer in that situation, wouldn't you open up the lids of the garbage bins to have a look?"
Luo Wenzhou's gaze went around the conference room. "Unless the girl can turn invisible, then there's something wrong with Lu Guosheng's head—was Xia Xiaonan injured?"
"No," said Lang Qiao, "I just confirmed it with the hospital. Aside from when she fell herself, there are no other evident wounds on her, and she wasn't sexually assaulted. Also, the stains on her backpack really are blood. They're extracting the DNA for comparison now, but they don't have a result yet."
Luo Wenzhou asked, "Were Xia Xiaolan's wallet, phone, and other valuables in her backpack?"
Lang Qiao stared. "No. You mean…"
Tao Ran put in a word. "In the National Road 327 case, Lu Guosheng snatched every penny he could, leaving the victims with nothing."
Lang Qiao frowned, feeling that she hadn't been conscientious enough about her work. Otherwise, why would everyone else be as familiar with the details of this so-called National Road 327 case as though enumerating their family treasures, while she didn't know anything?
"Also, when Feng Bin was calling for help on the way, where had the patrolmen and on-duty personnel at the tourist attraction gone?" Luo Wenzhou said. "Were they all conveniently not at their posts, or had they talked it over and decided not to get involved in others' misfortunes? Contact the tourist attraction and summon everyone on the night shift."
In a case where the suspect and his means were this evident at a glance, it seemed that the only thing left to do was to put out another wanted notice for Lu Guosheng. But in the midst of such simple cause and effect, there was a host of questionable points, as if the case was hidden in the Drum Tower's drizzling night mist.
Luo Wenzhou lit a cigarette at the end of the corridor. Then, suddenly seeming to sense something, he turned to look at the busy Criminal Investigation Team. Lao Yang's words were caught like a fishbone in his throat—"There are people there who have changed."
Luo Wenzhou got out his phone and dialed the City Bureau's HR department. "Hello, Director Li, it's Xiao Luo from the Criminal Investigation Team… Oh, no, I haven't been working hard.—Well, my superior wants me to write an evaluation for a new colleague… Who knows what's gotten into Lao Lu now? Could you send me the Criminal Investigation Team's new child's CV and political examination materials? Thank you, thank you, I know, another day I'll treat you to a meal…"
Because the City Bureau had gotten involved, the pace of the investigation went from that of an ox pulling a cart to that of the Space Age.
Before evening that day, the brats no one had found a trace of for the better part of a week were all brought back—the police had found the BD Supermarket where Feng Bin had bought snacks, discovered on the supermarket's security cameras that the runaway students had all gone through there to buy stuff more than once, and guessed that they had to be staying nearby.
Following a brief search in a radius around the supermarket, all of them were found at a convenience hotel and brought back—one of the students, perhaps while chasing celebrities, had gotten to know the hotel's lobby manager and gotten them in through the back door without registering.
The four students wiltingly stood lined up against the wall in the reception room, explaining in front of their homeroom teacher and the police why they'd wanted to run away—they said that there was too much stress at school and Christmas was coming up, so they'd gone out together to relax.
Their parents, burning with impatience, were exasperated when they heard this disgraceful reason, wanting nothing better than to slap these brats until they turned into spinning tops.
At the same time, the Drum Tower's employees were being interrogated by turns, turning up something fishy. The tourist attraction's security department, from the person in charge down to the patrolmen, had long-standing problems. They were all remiss in their duties; it was common practice among them to get together to gamble during the night shift. Now that something had happened, this finally came out.
At this point, aside from the murderer Lu Guosheng still being on the loose and the shocked girl still being in a stupor in the hospital, this whole case seemed to have been uncovered.
The students who had been brought back were taken away by their parents and teacher one after another. One of the boys was roughly pulled forward by his mother, with his enraged father's handprint on his face, swollen to twice its original size. His physiological tears were flowing non-stop. In this sorry state, he still kept turning his head, staring abjectly towards the City Bureau.
Luo Wenzhou, who was seeing them to the gate, was thoughtful for a moment, then called him to a halt. "Student, wait a moment."
The boy's parents stopped, hurriedly forcing down their anger, politely asking, "Is there something else, Comrade Police Officer?"
Luo Wenzhou walked over and considered the boy. He was a fair-skinned teenager, slightly fat, crying as he walked, looking a little younger than the other students who in reality were his peers. He seemed to be somewhat introverted. As soon as he saw Luo Wenzhou approach, he lowered his head uncomfortably.
Luo Wenzhou said, "What's your name?"
The boy quietly stammered, "Zhang Yifan."
Luo Wenzhou kept his voice as gentle as possible, asking, "Is there something you'd like to say to me?"
The boy's undeveloped larynx moved gently, the gazes of his teacher and his classmates at once falling on him. Luo Wenzhou frowned suddenly; those silent gazes made him uncomfortable for some reason.
Zhang Yifan's father couldn't stand his son's mincing manners. He raised a hand like a bear's paw, firmly slapping the boy's back. "If there is, then say it, and if there isn't, then say there isn't. Does it take so much effort to say a few words? Just looking at you makes me angry!"
The boy's face was panicked, like a person with social anxiety forced to talk to a powerful stranger. He began to cry again at once, blurting out, "There's…there's nothing."
Luo Wenzhou wanted to follow up when the boy buried his face against his mother's shoulder, walking away as quickly as though he were escaping.
Lang Qiao stretched, walking over. "Boss, this matter seems to have been resolved for now. When are we writing our report?"
"Don't be in such a hurry." Luo Wenzhou watched the boy leave hurriedly, then hung his jacket over his arm. "I'm going to go get an expert opinion first."
Lang Qiao stared. Before she could work out who the "expert" was, Luo Wenzhou asked her with a genial expression, "Xiao Qiao'er, what do you want for breakfast tomorrow?"
"Buns!" Lang Qiao didn't have a sliver of suspicion of his ill intent, gladly saying, "Thank you, imperial father!"
Luo Wenzhou looked at her with a fake smile and walked away.