As Luo Wenzhou spoke, his voice failed. He bent over, resting his elbows on his knees, squeezing Fei Du's hand from time to time.—There was nowhere for him to report to, no one he could ask for instructions. Everyone in the City Bureau was in a state of anxiety, coming and going with single-minded focus. No one could decide for him what his next step should be.
He also had nowhere to vent his grievances. Tao Ran was down, and Lang Qiao was inexperienced; if she wasn't panicking, she was making trouble, and all along watching for his expression.
Luo Wenzhou was silent too long. Fei Du lifted his chin and looked him over for a moment. "What's wrong?"
Luo Wenzhou looked up at him and let his mind wander a little, thinking that Fei Du was unlike any other person he knew.
The young and artless were like clear plastic bottles; you could see at a glance whether there was juice or coke inside. The older ones with deeper thoughts meanwhile were like frosted glass bottles, most with dark liquid in them; without opening them up and smelling, it was hard to determine whether it was soy sauce or vinegar.
But Fei Du was neither. He was more like a kaleidoscope with a thousand linked-together little pieces of glass inside it, all placed at different angles; the light going through was refracted countless times. There was no way to trace it.
Even though he was squeezing this person's hand, could touch every bit of his body without restraint, he still often didn't know what Fei Du was thinking.
In all of Luo Wenzhou's life, of all the individuals he had met who gave him headaches, Fei Du came out on top—both during the time they'd been mutually displeasing to each other, fighting as soon as they met, and now, when he wished he could hold him in his mouth, carry him over his head.
If a year ago someone had said to him that at the end of this year, he'd be this isolated and cut off from help in a world of ice and snow, only finding temporary comfort in holding Fei Du's wrist, he definitely would have thought that a fuse had burned out in that person's brain.
"It's nothing." Luo Wenzhou shook his head and smiled wryly. "Just feeling the grimness of an early midlife crisis."
Fei Du blinked, then suddenly drew close to his ear with an evil smile. "What, shixiong, do you feel your abilities are unequal to your ambitions? Why didn't you say so earlier? I'll look after you."
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
Then he pulled himself together and squeezed Fei Du's waist. "Are you looking for trouble again? I haven't settled the account with you yet after you were just playing around touching people's hands."
Fei Du's eyes wouldn't open fully. His gaze came languidly from between his eyelashes. He licked the corner of his mouth. "Oh? How do you want to settle this account?"
Luo Wenzhou didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Darling, Dad's already very sick at heart. Don't do your little bit to help me on my way to my heart attack."
Hearing that he could talk back, Fei Du slowly sat up straight and returned to the main subject. "What are you worried about?"
Luo Wenzhou let out a breath, his smile dimming. "Do you know what feeling this gives me?"
"Yes. Kong Weichen's connection to Director Zhang and him calling him beforehand are both too easy to investigate and too obvious, like someone's arranged the evidence," Fei Du answered without so much as looking up. "Your own people suspecting each other, the critical witness dead without giving evidence, pieces of evidence appearing one after another in sequence—you're thinking that this is too much like the miscarriage of justice fourteen years ago, just as though history were repeating."
Luo Wenzhou said expressionlessly, "I was just asking. What are you answering so completely for?—You're going to make me lose my sense of security like this, you know that?"
Fei Du had a mind to humor him. Feigning astonishment, he said, "You're with me, and you still have a sense of security? Captain Luo, are you too confident, or is my charm decreasing?"
Luo Wenzhou slapped the back of his hand. "Speak properly."
"All right, getting back to business," Fei Du said, "if I recall correctly, back in May, during the He Zhongyi case, when I went to your office to be interrogated—"
Luo Wenzhou laughed dryly. "To cooperate with the investigation. What interrogation? How come you're making it sound so bad?"
"All right, to cooperate with the investigation," Fei Du changed his wording obligingly. "I warned you then that the case was attracting an unusual amount of attention. That there was someone playing you.
"Starting from He Zhongyi's case, someone called The Reciter has been frequently making contributions to that radio program Tao Ran listens to. Following that thread," Fei Du put his hand into Luo Wenzhou's coat, fishing a small notebook out of an inner pocket, "you can say from the beginning what traces there are. I'll help you remember."
Luo Wenzhou was silent for a while, slowly pulling over the scarf hanging purely for decoration around Fei Du's neck and winding it around a few times, nearly wrapping it up to his chin. "Has there ever been a time when you were very scared?"
Fei Du paused, thinking about what he'd said, some fragmentary memories flashing through his mind like light, the blurred door of the basement and the sound of footsteps slowly drawing near flying over his mind, touching down lightly, then at once disappearing without a trace.
He shrugged. Using the most apt lover's tone, he said, "Yes, when I was afraid you were going to leave me."
Luo Wenzhou was so stirred up by his lines coming one after another that he really had no ideas, feeling that if in his whole life he could settle one Fei Du, it meant he must have some skill and dumb luck. Thinking this, he felt quite a bit easier in spite of himself.
"The reason that the City Bureau got involved in the case of He Zhongyi's murder in the first place was that we received a report at the same time, sent up by the murdered girl Chen Yuan's brother Chen Zhen.—You understand what I mean? It wasn't sent to the City Bureau. It was reported to the higher authorities, and the higher authorities ordered the City Bureau to make a thorough investigation. We had to investigate, whether we wanted to or not.
"Chen Zhen had no regular work. He was a black cab driver. He was full of mistrust towards me when we first met. I thought at the beginning that it was strange that he'd reported Wang Hongliang himself, so why wasn't he cooperating when someone came to investigate? Thinking about it now, under the first impulse of rage, Chen Zhen must have tried reporting Wang Hongliang more than once, but all the reports sank like stones into the sea. As time went on, he didn't believe anyone would come investigate."
Fei Du nodded. "With no evidence that would stand up for such a sensational thing as a sub-bureau taking part in drug trafficking, it would look at first like the ravings of a lunatic. All kinds of reports come in every day like snowflakes, and Chen Zhen had neither status nor position. No one would pay attention to deliberate provocation like that."
"Right. When Director Zhang sent me to investigate this business, what he originally said was, the things this report said definitely weren't true, but it wouldn't have come out of nowhere if there was nothing wrong. Wang Hongliang was holding his position without doing a bit of work, and it was likely there were other problems with his style. It was no wonder people were messing with him. It's easy to offend someone while investigating a sub-bureau official, and it would be a delicate matter how to give an account to the person who'd made the report when the investigation was over, so he wanted me to go personally. Only…"
"Only he didn't expect that the report's contents would turn out to be true," Fei Du picked up. "But reasonably speaking, Wang Hongliang knew you. If he was clever enough, when he saw you and Tao Ran come, he should have understood more or less what you had come for. The Flower Market District had been kept under wraps for so many years; why was he revealed so easily?"
"It's not that I'm especially great, it's that someone was deliberately pushing this thing outwards," Luo Wenzhou said. "The killer Zhao Haochang dumped the body and inexplicably attracted notice, and the place where he dumped it just happened to be their weak spot. That was the first thing."
"The average criminal couldn't have guessed at that psychopath Zhao Haochang's line of thought. At the time, if Wang Hongliang's logic had been normal, he should have energetically cooperated with the City Bureau in investigating He Zhongyi's murder, calmly gone to find evidence that the Golden Triangle Lot wasn't the initial scene of He Zhongyi's death, as quickly as possible directing your line of sight away from their drug trafficking location.—In fact, that evidence wasn't hard to find. Tao Ran and I both found evidence that the deceased had gone to the Chengguang Mansion the night before." Fei Du drew a line in Luo Wenzhou's notebook and wrote the name "Ma Xiaowei." "But before that, something else unexpected happened."
"Ma Xiaowei's testimony was incoherent and seemed mentally handicapped, and it succeeded in turning him into a suspect in He Zhongyi's murder. At the same time, he was also like a piece of double-sided tape, sticking our focus firmly to the place where there'd been a drug transaction." Luo Wenzhou recalled with some difficulty for a moment. "Right, now you say it, I've remembered, the fuse for that was the dispute between Ma Xiaowei and the natives, igniting the two sides' accumulated grievances, and that's why they started fighting and all got brought in."
"You're saying that that mass brawl that attracted police notice wasn't necessarily an accident." Fei Du paused, tilting his head slightly. "While Wang Hongliang was in an awkward position then, he still had a chance, because Ma Xiaowei's urine test showed that he really had taken drugs, and it's very normal for drug users to have confused intellects and talk nonsense. Or he could have simply arrested a crowd of scapegoats, said that Ma Xiaowei had been buying drugs from them that night, rendered meritorious service, and given you an accounting. It wouldn't have taken any particular effort to get themselves out of it. It would only have involved silencing a few mouths."
But just then, Chen Zhen, who hadn't trusted the police, had acted precipitously and gotten trapped in the Great Fortune Building. When Luo Wenzhou got word and rushed over, he bumped into Huang Jinglian and the others murdering Chen Zhen. Then Huang Jinglian, cornered and desperate, had even tried to kill Luo Wenzhou as well… It had been demented, but it had been hard evidence, pulling the whole Flower Market District Sub-Bureau underwater.
The only problem in all of that was that Huang Jinglian had neither planned nor needed to kill Chen Zhen so hastily.
"Actually, there was also a suspicious point then." Luo Wenzhou thought about it and said, "When I charged into the Great Fortune Building, the girl at the front desk passed me a warning note, and purposefully arranged a room for me with a hidden window, so if anything went wrong, I could jump out the window and run right away—we were total strangers, briefly meeting for the first time, and that girl risked herself to help me… Let's say the world is kind to attractive people, but it still seems like she knew ahead of time that Huang Jinglian and the others would try to kill me. I went to investigate later, and that receptionist had vanished without a trace.
"If Chen Zhen hadn't died, Huang Jinglian wouldn't necessarily have been so bold. But if Chen Zhen wasn't killed by Huang Jinglian, then who killed him?" After Luo Wenzhou had watched Fei Du write "Chen Zhen" in the notebook, he went on, "The third critical figure is a mysterious individual, the one who sent the text message to He Zhongyi's phone. We thought at the time that it was Zhao Haochang putting it on himself. But what if it really wasn't Zhao Haochang? If Zhao Haochang dumped the body in the West Flower Market District because this mysterious individual showed him the way?—Those are the three crucial points in solving the case, and, for Wang Hongliang, fatal coincidences."
There were too many coincidences; it didn't sound true.
And because Zhang Donglai had unexpectedly been drawn in and Director Zhang, as a close relative, had had to step back to avoid suspicion, he hadn't had time to react throughout the whole process.
"The first step was to make the crucial individual step down from the crucial sphere. The train of thought is extremely clear from beginning to end." Fei Du added a circle around what he'd just written down. "The next time we heard a submission from The Reciter, it was in the case of the female children being trafficked. Apart from being horrifying, that case wasn't especially complicated. The critical point was Su Luozhan copying Su Xiaolan's signature, revealing all of them, as well as the place where they disposed of the bodies. Su Luozhan is a natural sadist. If she found out what Su Xiaolan had done to the victims' families before, then there was no doubt that she would copy it and would even escalate. The question is, who was the person who revealed the details of the old case to her?"
"After that was the Zhou Clan. Zheng Kaifeng used Dong Qian to kill Zhou Junmao. The strange thing was the package sent in Dong Qian's name to Dong Xiaoqing. Because of that package, Dong Xiaoqing stabbed Zhou Huaixin, and they were forced to kill her to silence her, at the same time revealing the fact that someone had deliberately plotted the fake car accident to commit murder. Someone hijacked Dong Xiaoqing's phone number that day and sent a message to Xiao Haiyang, luring the police into coming over, and they also set Dong Xiaoqing's house on fire." Luo Wenzhou sighed. "Finally, there was Wei Wenchuan hiring an assassin. According to Wei Wenchuan's confession, he's been in contact with this mysterious online friend for a few years. This person used a lengthy plan and setup to lead us step by step from the place in Binhai where the bodies were dumped, to the den of wanted criminals, until we caught Lu Guosheng alive and found where he was hidden—"
After blowing away the confounding dust, the initially bewildering sequence was beginning to be revealed; laid out in the old notebook, it seemed especially shocking.
"There are a few possibilities. First, like One-Eye said, there was internal strife in the criminal organization, some powerful force doing what Fei Chengyu wanted to do but couldn't accomplish—squeezing out the other backers, controlling the whole gang himself. Or they're aiming at one particular person inside the City Bureau, and this is all for the sake of digging up Gu Zhao's case." Fei Du bent his frozen fingers and picked up his phone. "Like The Reciter's submission this week—revenge. Which do you incline towards?"
Just then, a phone call came from an unknown number, popping up over the reading software. Fei Du looked at Luo Wenzhou and picked up. "Hello?"
"It's me, Zhou Huaijin." The man on the phone spoke in a low voice. "I'm in the country now. Could you come see me?"
Fei Du put down the phone and turned to say to Luo Wenzhou, "Shixiong, there's a strange man who wants to meet me. Do you approve? You won't make me kneel in penitence when we get home, will you?"