Luo Wenzhou said, "What did you say?"
His voice wasn't loud, and based solely on his words, he was speaking reasonably. But Director Lu for a time didn't quite know how to answer. Putting himself in Luo Wenzhou's shoes, he felt that the next moment he would burst into vulgar language over the obstruction of the phone signal—of course, even if Luo Wenzhou really did speak rudely, Director Lu could do nothing but pardon it.
But instead, the two of them were silent over the phone for five seconds, and Luo Wenzhou didn't erupt. "Fei Du's message says, 'The place where this started is the place where it will end.' But there's no one at the old location of The Louvre."
Lu Youliang said grimly, "Zhang Chunjiu betrayed Gu Zhao and made him bear a stigma, dying unjustly. Gu Zhao died in the fire at The Louvre, and The Louvre was bankrolled by Fei Chengyu and built by Zhang Chunling. The two of them should count as the chief culprits of Gu Zhao's murder. The Reciter's methods are private justice in the form of 'a tooth for a tooth,' so Zhang Chunjiu, who was responsible for the framing, had to take back the charge he framed Gu Zhao for—so if I've understood correctly, as the killer, Zhang Chunling should burn to death at the old location of The Louvre. But why aren't they here?"
Luo Wenzhou, wearing his headphones, really couldn't restrain himself. He opened the window of the speeding car, and the biting cold winter wind came pelting in, accelerated by the speed. His colleague driving the car gave a start as he was swept by the cold wind, but he quietly glanced at Luo Wenzhou's face and didn't dare to make a sound.
Luo Wenzhou closed his eyes, more and more fretfulness and anxiety amassing in his heart, enough to send the globe exploding up to the Big Dipper.
He unconsciously squeezed his knuckles. "Fei Du wouldn't mislead us on purpose. There was no need for it, and he doesn't want to commit suicide."
Lu Youliang said, "I don't understand. Since he had a premonition that the tracking device would be removed, why couldn't he have given us a definite location…"
"Because he wasn't sure." Luo Wenzhou slowly let out a white breath. "He isn't a roundworm in The Reciter's—that Fan Siyuan's—belly. Even though he roughly knows what he's thinking, he still can't accurately read his mind. That's why he was unclear about the address and left us his line of thought. I think the general direction is right, but the 'place where this started' that Fan Siyuan thought of isn't the same one we're thinking of… The former location of The Louvre is where Gu Zhao was wronged, and the ski run used to be Heng'an Orphanage, the place where Zhang Chunjiu and his brother came from—if neither of those is right, where else can it be?"
Where else was there?
Drawing near to four-thirty in the morning, the sky showed no signs of lightening; the morning star was unhurriedly climbing up.
"Fei Du…Fei Du is extremely audacious. He'd dare to do anything. But he isn't rash, and he's very meticulous. If the message he left you hinted at the old location of The Louvre, it shows that he thought there was a good chance Fan Siyuan would go there, and it was worth a gamble. But he may also have mentioned the remaining low-probability chance. Uncle Lu, please help me…help me think…"
Luo Wenzhou's words had started out very orderly, but at the end, somehow his voice broke. He cleared his throat twice in a row, but it was still fiercely blocked. He couldn't keep back his last words.
Standing in the cold wind, Lu Youliang turned his head to look at the building behind him—that high, oddly-styled roof must have been the movie theater. Apparently the tickets were all bought out for the first two days of the new year; in recent years it had somehow become popular to go out for the family dinner on New Year's Eve. In another fifteen hours or so, this place would be a brightly lit scene full of a babble of voices.
Fourteen years had passed, and he still remembered the unforgettable ruins of the fire, still remembered how thunderstruck he had felt when he'd heard what had happened to Gu Zhao.
Lu Youliang took a deep breath. "Tao Ran—right! I've remembered, before he left, he contacted a friend of his abroad who's with Zhou Huaijin. They've found someone who used to work for the Zhou family. They mentioned Heng'an Orphanage, and then, according to that person's account, he had Tao Ran track down the file on the murder of Heng'an Orphanage's director!"
Fei Du had given Tao Ran a soporific. The dose hadn't been large. At a time like that, he ought to have been coaxing him to go to sleep, not talking to him about such an invigorating old case… So what had he thought of then?
"Hao Zhenhua was Heng'an Orphanage's director. He was stabbed three times when he opened the door. Then the killer hit him over the head with a blunt object continuously until he died. When he was dead, the killer still wasn't satisfied. He stabbed the body ten more times. This charge was placed on a gang of burglars." Tao Ran, half-immobilized, pressed the phone to his ear. "At the time of the crime, the deceased Hao Zhenhua was alone in his residence in the outskirts—no, it wasn't a villa, so-called villas hadn't been thought of yet at the time. He'd somehow managed to get a homestead in his hometown, built himself a house, and used it specially for storing his valuables, like a secret treasury.—I have the address, I've sent it to you, but the whole area was relocated twenty years ago because of road repairs. I looked up the location on the computer just now. It must be where Yan Sea Highway passes through. No matter what, I don't think The Reciter can go up onto the highway."
Luo Wenzhou had no attention to spare to answer. He quickly pulled up a map.—Yan Sea Highway stretched from the southeast of Yan City, connecting Yan City to the bordering Binhai District. The entrance to the highway was by the East Forest Ski Run. That was where Zhang Chunjiu and the others had left the main road, turning into the sports park.
The ski run was where Heng'an Orphanage had been. The asshole director had used the orphanage to frantically accumulate ill-gotten gains, which he couldn't take directly home to arrange, so he'd delivered them all to his little treasury in the countryside. The location of this "little treasury" was very delicate. It was under Yan City's jurisdiction, but it was on the border between Yan City and Binhai…
Yan Sea Highway…the Binhai District…
Tao Ran said, "This Hao Zhenhua was killed the year after Zhou Yahou's death, about thirty-seven years ago. Zhang Chunjiu would have been an adolescent, and Zhang Chunling would have been around twenty-five. This murder's comparatively bloody method, the mistreatment of the body, and the excessive stabbing show that the attacker's emotional state was very unstable. The scene shows violence and disorder. The deceased was entirely unguarded when he opened the door. On the one hand, he may have known the killer. On the other hand, he may have thought that there was no danger from the killer—synthesizing all of the above, my guess is that the one who stabbed him was the adolescent Zhang Chunjiu. There must have been an adult assisting him to gather the property and calmly clean up the scene. This murder was later by coincidence attributed to a looting gang. I analyzed it for Fei Du and said I thought it may have been the first murder they committed. It's likely that their reasoning and method in committing crimes was a lesson learned from the experience of getting away with this one."
"Gather the property?" Luo Wenzhou quickly followed up. "How much did the killers take from the deceased's home?"
"Unclear," Tao Ran said. "The wardrobes at the scene had all been rifled. They were practically empty. If everything inside had been taken, the quantity must have been impressive. But in order to cover up the truth, the victim's family maintained that the wardrobes had been empty to start with. The case was resolved carelessly, without a close investigation."
Lie low, kill, disguise the scene, take a great quantity of property and flee… That was all right if it had only been cash, but if there had been other things—enough property to fill up a few wardrobes—they must at least have had a stronghold nearby.
That stronghold was likely the origin, where Zhang brothers had begun their crimes!
But where would it be?
Yes, there was also Su Hui's dumping site in Binhai.—In the past, the status of places on the periphery of Yan City, like the Binhai District, had been unclear; there were many unused plots of land in the outskirts waiting to be developed, none of them worth any money. Which one of them wouldn't have been more convenient than Binhai, a place in a different administrative district?
Why would Zhang Chunling and the others have chosen Binhai?
The art teacher Yu Bin had encountered Zhang Chunling and Su Hui in Binhai and had been silenced because of it. This had happened fourteen years ago. The organization had already been in its finished form then. Given Zhang Chunling's power and caution, would he have personally gone to that awful place to accompany Su Hui in dumping a body?
That didn't accord with reason.
But if it hadn't been to dump a body, then what had he gone there to do?
Was it possible that Zhang Chunjiu and the others' initial stronghold had been…
"Stop the car!" Luo Wenzhou suddenly said. "I have something to ask Zhang Chunjiu!"
Luo Wenzhou didn't wait for the car to stop fully before charging out, yanking Zhang Chunjiu out of the escorting police car. "When you killed Hao Zhenhua, the director of Heng'an Orphanage, the stronghold you shadowed him from, and where you divided up the loot, was in Binhai, right? Where was it?"
For a moment Zhang Chunjiu couldn't understand why he was asking this. He stared blankly. But since his scheme had fallen through, he truly was full of hatred towards Luo Wenzhou, so he only answered with a sneer, not saying a word.
If he could, Luo Wenzhou would simply have torn Zhang Chunjiu's head off, turned him over, and pulled out the words hidden in his belly. He firmly gripped Zhang Chunjiu's collar. Zhang Chunjiu was lifted by him, tottering, a breath catching in his throat, choking him so purplish red rose in his face. His gaze met Luo Wenzhou's bloodshot eyes. He displayed a cold smile.
"Will you answer?!"
Just then, Lu Youliang's voice came over his earpiece. "Wenzhou, let me talk to him."
Luo Wenzhou forced down the magma constantly erupting in his chest, pulled out the cord of his headphones, and pressed his phone to the coughing Zhang Chunjiu's ear.
"Lao Zhang, it's me."
Zhang Chunjiu's gaze flashed slightly—after all, he and Director Lu had been friends for over twenty years.
But Lu Youliang didn't bring up old times to stir up emotion. "Listen to me. Your big brother Zhang Chunling is with The Reciter—Fan Siyuan and his gang. They're all over there now. Fan Siyuan used your nephew's life to lure him in. I don't think you need me to tell you what he wants to do."
Zhang Chunjiu's expression at last altered.
"If we capture Zhang Chunling, we'll hand him over to the procuratorate according to procedure after we've finished interrogating him. Even if the highest court condemns him to death with prompt execution, he can still die with dignity, and you'll have a chance to see him again. But if he falls into Fan Siyuan's hands… Do as you see fit—"
Fei Du couldn't stand up. He was entirely dragged along. Hearing the gunfire outside constantly drawing near, for a moment he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Zhang Chunling, a psychopath guilty of heinous crimes, a scoundrel spanning the decades who could occupy the trending topics on all the major social networking sites, was grinding his teeth, on the one hand wishing to rip him to pieces, on the other hand watching the clock, holding his nose, and doing his utmost to save his life before daylight.
Fei Du found laughter amidst suffering, feeling that he was like a human master who had summoned a demon from hell, and Zhang Donglai was an unbreakable contract—alcohol-scented, human-shaped.
"If you can still laugh at a time like this, I believe now that you wouldn't cry if you saw a coffin." Fan Siyuan sighed quietly by his ear. "The first time I saw you, I watched with my own eyes as Fei Chengyu dragged you out of that cabinet, beat your mother, put those zero sum metal rings around your neck and hers. She collapsed on the spot, but you didn't make a sound from beginning to end, didn't shed a tear… I was very curious then—what lived inside the body of such a beautiful, adorable little boy?"
Fei Du laughed mockingly. "The superhero Teacher Fan. A miserable woman and her child were being tortured like that in front of you—why didn't you save us?"
"Your mother killed her father for Fei Chengyu's sake, and you're the continuation of his filthy bloodline. The two of you are parts of Fei Chengyu. What are you doing playing for pity? When I saw the look in your eyes, I knew that when you had spread your wings, you would backlash against Fei Chengyu. I was eagerly looking forward to knowing the outcome of the father and son battle. Why would I have prevented it? Unfortunately, time waits for no man. The tumor came before I got to see the end of the drama, so I had to move first."
As he spoke, the gunfight outside had grown increasingly outrageous. Zhang Chunling's criminal subordinates evidently had the upper hand and quickly charged in. Fan Siyuan's attitude sitting in his wheelchair was truly out of tune with the surroundings, extremely eye-catching. As soon as the other charged in, he saw them. He didn't say a word; a clip of bullets shot towards Fan Siyuan.
Fan Siyuan wasn't at all flustered. The cement floor in front of him rose out of nowhere, blocking the bullets whistling towards him and revealing an underground passage. The woman pushing him quickly went in, and Fei Du was hauled up and thrown over someone's shoulder, his chest caught against the person's hard shoulder. He nearly blacked out—
After taking the art student back home, Xiao Haiyang and Lang Qiao, carrying the sketch Yu Bin had left behind with his life, went to look for the place where the collision had occurred according to the art student's directions. When they'd found the approximate location, they received a dispatch call.
"Take note—approximately twenty kilometers west of the east coast cliffs is an abandoned vehicle rental center. The location has been sent to all of you. A group of criminals has taken a hostage. They are armed. Take care. Once more, they are armed…"
Xiao Haiyang and Lang Qiao exchanged a look.
"An abandoned vehicle rental center?" Xiao Haiyang muttered to himself for a moment. "Didn't Yu Bin's student say they rented a car from the scenic area where they were staying?"
Lang Qiao quickly scanned the map. "It's not far. Come on!"