"Hou Shufen, female, fifty-three years old, Han ethnicity.—What is your relationship to Yin Ping?"
"He…he's my old man."
"I see. You and Yin Ping are husband and wife. Are you acquainted with Yin Ping's older brother Yin Chao?"
The woman nodded silently.
"Do you know that Yin Chao may be dead, and the murderer may be your husband Yin Ping?"
The woman lifted her head in terror, looking at the criminal policeman questioning her. Her eyes, pressed down by eyelids so limp only a crack remained, looked muddled and perplexed, but there was no shock.
The police officer gazed fixedly at her, repeated the question, then raised his voice slightly. "Hou Shufen, you're being questioned."
The woman's hands were twisted together, carelessly digging at her chilblains. She said falteringly, "He never told me anything."
"I didn't ask you whether he told you anything." The criminal policeman questioning her had seen everything. He could hear that she was avoiding the question. "I asked you whether you knew that your husband may have killed someone. Think about it, then answer. This is a public security bureau."
The woman shook with fear, avoiding the criminal policeman's gaze, lowering her eyes and staring at her own stained cloth shoes. She shifted around from side to side for a moment, unable to sit still. "…there was a time when he had a lot of nightmares. He'd always wake up screaming in the night, yelling out nonsense…"
"Yelling what?"
"Yelling things like, 'Don't pester me,' and, 'Yin Chao, you lingering spirit.' We used to live in a house and had our own little yard. There were two big scholar trees by the gate, nearly grown to full size. Like a madman, he insisted on cutting them down. And cutting them down wasn't enough. He found someone to dig up the roots, then sold off the wood for a trifle. No one could talk him out of it… He said those trees were inauspicious, that they were constraining him. I felt something was a little off then."
"You only felt it was off?" the police officer asked in disbelief.
The woman's chin touched her chest. Only the whorl at the top of her head showed. Her hair was sparse and her scalp was deathly pale. There was ugly dandruff on the hairs. After a long silence, she vaguely repeated, "He never told me anything."
On the bench in the hospital corridor, Luo Wenzhou finished watching the record of the questioning of Yin Ping's wife. He expressionlessly closed the laptop on his knees. "He never told me anything, so I'm not an accomplice, and I'm not responsible. I only closed my eyes, stopped my ears, didn't think of anything, steadfastly passed my days. Was I sharing my bed with a murderer? Let him be whatever he likes. As long as he doesn't get arrested, as long as he can still go to work and earn his wages and carry on as usual, none of it matters."
How plain and stupid.
Lang Qiao stood next to him. She bent down and said quietly, "The area Yin Ping was speeding towards has a few big scholar trees in it. We investigated each of them and found a corpse at the foot of one of the trees. The medical examiners on the scene had a rough look. They believe the deceased is male, in his forties, around a meter seventy-five tall. The back of his head was struck several times with a blunt object before his death. Concrete information will have to wait for detailed materials from the medical examiners, but judging from the information we currently have, we all think that the person buried under the tree is most likely Yin Chao.
The skeleton that had been buried deep under the tree had finally floated up to the surface and once more seen the light of day along with the old case.
Lang Qiao looked at the low door of the hospital room and, suddenly lowering her voice, said to Luo Wenzhou, "Boss, Director Lu…and some other deputy directors haven't come to work for the last few days. There's a lot of pressing material that needs to be endorsed for the end of the year. There's only Director Ceng left, and he doesn't know what to do now, I…"
Luo Wenzhou gently interrupted her. "I told you to investigate the City Bureau's surveillance system. Did you do it?"
"I was just about to tell you," Lang Qiao said quietly. "While I was cleaning up, I broke the camera in 203, and when I reported it and requested that it be repaired, two unfamiliar people came with the director. The director told me to do what I needed to do, and I couldn't stay on. While I was shuffling over to the door, I turned back and saw the maintenance worker saying something to the unfamiliar people. The whole atmosphere was wrong… And now the whole City Bureau is being overhauled…"
It seemed that not only was there a problem, the problem was very big.
Luo Wenzhou raised his head and looked at her.
Lang Qiao's palms were sweating. She wiped them on the hem of her clothes. "Boss, what's going on with Director Lu and the others? This can't be happening because I was too rash?"
"It doesn't have anything to do with you." Luo Wenzhou shook his head. "Tell me what you've determined."
"All the repair records are there," Lang Qiao said quickly. "Aside from the emergency situation the year before last, the rest is all the factory coming over for regular maintenance… The purchasing and installation were all according to procedure, and I can't investigate procedure for no good reason. I slipped in and had a look while the director of administration was out. There's a complete record of documents from the meeting concerned. The factory is a proper factory, it's not only the City Bureau that uses it. There were no problems on the surface, so the problem could only be in the repairs during the emergency situation the year before last—I investigated it. There's a register of the maintenance worker's credentials from back then, with his work ID number and full name, but when I went to the factory to ask about him, they said that he had resigned not long ago."
Lang Qiao's throat tightened somewhat. "The date he resigned was the very day we arrested Lu Guosheng. I went to his recorded address and searched in the area. The house was rented out to someone else two years ago. The address is a fake."
When Lang Qiao had questioned the students in 203 that day, the contents had been leaked, and Wei Zhanhong had received the information at once and then had been contained, it had amounted to a revelation of the informer inside the City Bureau.
"Don't search anymore. I figure you won't find anything," Luo Wenzhou said. "Was there a problem with the report and request for repairs? Did anyone who shouldn't have asked ask?"
"Not likely," Lang Qiao said. "The request for repairs was made because 203 was just being used to interrogate the boss of a looting gang. The colleagues in the observation room suddenly found that they couldn't use the cameras, and a lot of people reported it together."
Luo Wenzhou rubbed the center of his brow.
"Boss, we always used to be very peaceful, but ever since Director Zhang got in trouble over Wang Hongliang and got transferred out, things keep going wrong one after another. First it was Zheng Kaifeng getting advance information and running on the day he got blown up, and now this…" Lang Qiao's voice was growing quieter and quieter. At the end she was nearly mouthing the words. "…they're all saying it's Director Lu."
Before Luo Wenzhou could answer, Lang Qiao put both hands on her knees and took a deep breath and said shakily, "It can't be Director Lu."
"Xiao Qiao…" said Luo Wenzhou.
"It can't be Director Lu, really, believe me.—When I was in elementary school, some drug addicts gathered in a little park by my school, got high and went crazy. A crowd of maniacs with knives charged into the school and injured a security guard. The school locked down the classroom building, but my class was outside at PE. A lot of people were crying from fear. The maniacs were screaming and shouting, like they were acting as monsters in a cartoon. The police came very quickly. I remember it all very clearly. Director Lu was leading them. He had a scar on his forehead, but he didn't look scary at all. He caught all the bad guys very quickly. I snuck off and ran after them. I wanted to give him a bottle of fruit juice. But he must have misunderstood. He took it and opened it for me, then gave it back and quietly said, 'Hurry and run back now, I won't tell your teacher.' …Because of this, of the thirty-six people in our class, four went into the public security system afterwards, and six are in related professions. That's a third of the class following in his footsteps just like me…. It can't be him.
"Are they going to wrongly accuse him?" Lang Qiao's eyes were open very wide. Her eyelashes trembled slightly, and her tears ran down. "Officer Gu was wrongly accused, what if…"
Luo Wenzhou quietly swallowed down the words "people change." He got up and pressed the laptop into Lang Qiao's arms. "There's no what if. If there is, what are you getting paid for? Are you still that elementary school student who can't even open a bottle of juice?"
Lang Qiao subconsciously took the computer and looked at him in amazement.
"You're in the City Bureau. You're qualified to wear a uniform. You can request a sidearm, can carry handcuffs and a truncheon. So if you want to know something, go investigate it yourself. If you think someone's being wrongly accused, then go arrest someone who isn't wrongly accused.—You were pretty slick taking down Wei Zhanhong in the men's bathroom. How come you're going backwards the older you get?"
Lang Qiao was frozen.
Luo Wenzhou pulled a stern face and glared at her. "Get to work. No vacation this year."
Lang Qiao forgot about getting wrinkles from pulling at your eyelids. She rubbed heavily at her eyes with her sleeve. "Yes, sir!"
Just then, the sound of footsteps came from the other end of the hall. It was the unique sound of Fei Du's footsteps, always walking to some rhythm. It seemed as though even if the sky fell and the earth cracked, it still wouldn't make him use his legs to run a few steps.
Unfortunately, he wasn't bringing any good news this time.
Fei Du first looked towards Tao Ran's hospital room. Tao Ran, wrapped up like a mummy, was still sleeping. Chang Ning, who'd come over when she'd heard the news, was watching at his bedside. She must have been somewhat worn out. She had her forehead propped on one hand, napping in her chair. Fei Du put a coat over her and put a warm cup of tea by her hand, then withdrew, quietly closing the door. "Yin Ping's surgery didn't go well."
"What do you mean?" said Luo Wenzhou.
"Since murdering his brother, Yin Ping hasn't been doing very well. He's had long-term insomnia, and a drinking habit. His income is limited, so he's been drinking cheap goods with who knows what mixed in. His heart, liver, and kidneys all have different degrees of chronic illness. The risk of a blood clot was very high. Even without this car crash, he may have fallen over dead any day," Fei Du said quickly. "The doctor said that even though the surgery is finished, they don't know when he'll wake up, and when he does, there will definitely be after-effects. The more optimistic outlook is that he'll be half-paralyzed and have trouble speaking. It's also possible he simply won't be able to recover an ordinary level of cognitive function."
"What?" said Lang Qiao.
Luo Wenzhou sighed heavily. "He'll lose his mind."
"Why does he get to lose his mind?!" Lang Qiao bristled as soon as she heard this, then noticed that her voice had been too loud and hurriedly forced it lower. "If he loses his mind, I'll deal him another one and send him right to the other side to apologize for his crime!"
The City Bureau's people were in a state of anxiety; they were a host of dragons without a head, Tao Ran was lying in the hospital, his colleagues didn't know who could be trusted…and the only witness was dead to the world.
They were besieged from all sides.
Luo Wenzhou paced a few steps in the oppressive corridor. He very much wanted to laugh bitterly.—Since time immemorial, acting like a prick brought down a bolt of lightning. He'd just poured some chicken soup into Lang Qiao, and now in the blink of any eye she'd rallied, just like that.
Just then, a call came from Xiao Haiyang.
Luo Wenzhou's finger paused over his phone. Then he swiped to pick up. "Little Glasses, if you don't have good news, either, I'll fire you."