Silent Reading 默读 [BL Novel by Priest]

Chapter 140 to 150

CHAPTER 140 - Edmond Dantès XI

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?"

CHAPTER 141 - Edmond Dantès XII

This was a rather tasteful Japanese restaurant. You had to take your shoes off at the door, and there was no main dining hall; inside was one miniature private room after another. Fei Du went in alone to answer the invitation. When he opened the door, he nearly didn't recognize Zhou Huaijin.

This genuine heir to the Zhou Clan was wearing what could be called a simple stone-colored coat. There was none of the pomade he'd used before in his hair. There was a giant piece of luggage standing against the wall to one side, looking weatherbeaten. His face still counted as good-looking, but he'd lost weight and looked somewhat skeletal. There was white at the temples of his very trimly cut hair, giving him somewhat the appearance of old age.

If before Zhou Huaijin had looked like the young master of a powerful family, now, with his hair white, wearing different clothes, he'd nearly become a tossed-about, down and out middle-aged man. Clearly the youthful, graceful skin of the wealthy truly was as thin as a cicada's wing.

"I went gray young. Barely past twenty, and my head was grizzled. I always dyed it before, but I haven't been in the mood to fuss with it lately. You must think it's funny, President Fei." Zhou Huaijin smiled at Fei Du. "Please sit. A friend and I privately opened this restaurant many years ago. Even my family didn't know. It's safe to talk here."

Fei Du's gaze swept over an oil painting on the wall. It was a painting of a sunset, a rather common subject, and the painting also conformed to social norms; there was nothing visibly outstanding about it. The colors were rich and warm. While it didn't have any artistic value, it was still very much in accord with common aesthetic sensibilities.

Fei Du politely said a word of praise. "Very tasteful."

"Huaixin painted it. I told him to paint a few landscapes I could hang in a living room or bedroom, and he said he wasn't a decorator... But in the end he held his nose and painted me a few... Unfortunately he didn't have time to come here." Zhou Huaijin looked in the same direction as him, his eyes dimming. "Will you have tea? Or some sake?"

"Tea is fine. They don't let me drink alcohol at home."

Zhou Huaijin wiped his hands and poured tea for Fei Du. "Here.—Back then, I only wanted to leave myself a fallback for when I left the Zhou family one day. It was a great plan, opening a little eatery in a deep alley that only admitted a few tables of customers each day. The customers would be refined and few, the inside of the restaurant would be peaceful and quiet. But it was only a dream. Can a livelihood be that easy? From the time this restaurant opened, up to now, it hasn't made a penny. I have to put up hundreds of thousands each year to prop it up."

Fei Du smiled, not answering. While Zhou Huaijin was an unloved "poor little boy" with no family, he was still a "poor little boy" dressed in gold and silver; the mushrooms in the corners of the Zhou family villa were bigger than the umbrellas in other people's houses.

"All these years, I've hated the Zhou family, but I couldn't give up the wealth and position and kept dithering uselessly.—Such a large family property. President Fei, if it were you, could you stand to give it up?"

"Zhou-xiong," Fei Du said, looking at him, "go ahead and say what you have to say. If you weren't ready, you wouldn't have called me."

Zhou Huaijin met his gaze, soundlessly looking into Fei Du's eyes for a moment. He nodded and rather desolately said, "Wealth and rank are like floating clouds. If I could have put them aside like you, Huaixin wouldn't have died so young. I took the liberty of arranging to meet you because I investigated some things after I left. Though the Zhou family has been discredited domestically, it can still struggle to support itself abroad. But when I've said what I have to say today, I'll have to start from nothing afterwards."

"I'm all ears," Fei Du said.

"I suppose you remember the package of expired medicine left in the safety deposit box when my mother passed away? You're the one who told me to pay close attention to it."

Fei Du nodded—Zhou Huaijin's mother was the same Mrs. Zhou who had killed her husband and changed to another one who was also a scumbag. From Zhou Huaijin's description, the best-by date on her second marriage hadn't been as long as that of soy milk you had to drink as soon as you opened it.

But while a husband and wife could leave each other any time, an alliance that had conspired to kill and rob didn't dare to act so willfully. Therefore, aside from shared stock ownership, Mrs. Zhou must have possessed something else that could deter Zhou Junmao. But when she'd passed away and Zhou Huaijin had opened the safety deposit box she'd kept locked all her life, he'd found that inside it was only a package of expired heart medicine.

"When I went back, I examined that package of medicine over and over for a long time. I really couldn't think what it was good for. I indulged in wild fantasies, thinking that it might be evidence of Zhou Junmao killing Zhou Yahou, even asked someone to determine whether there were bloodstains and DNA on it. But there was nothing there."

"Even if there had been, it still couldn't have been used as evidence. Anyone could have smeared blood on the package of medicine at any time. If it had been evidence collected by the police at the time, it might have had some research value, but now that Zhou Yahou's bones are cold, using that as evidence would be too lax."

"Yes, I even suspected that my mom had kept this thing purely to scare Zhou Junmao—until I inadvertently looked at the barcode on the box of medicine." Zhou Huaijin picked up his phone and opened a picture, showing Fei Du the mysterious package of medicine. "This is it.

"I don't know whether you memorized things like classical poetry or the digits of pi or other things children don't understand when you were little to improve your rote memorization skills. When I was little, my mother made me memorize barcodes. I know that usually goods use EAN barcodes. The first three digits indicate the country it belongs to. President Fei, look, this package of medicine was produced in the US, but the first three digits on the barcode are 480."

"480 isn't the code for the US?"

"It's for the Philippines."

Fei Du enlarged the photograph and examined it closely for a moment. "But this barcode isn't thirteen digits, and there are small spaces printed between the numbers, so I guess it wasn't torn off of some product from the Philippines."

"It wasn't," Zhou Huaijin said. "There are four numbers after the 480, and then a little space—what does a four-digit number make you think of?"

Fei Du frowned. "Anything that can be numbered... How many numbers are in their postal codes?"

"You're right, postal codes in the Philippines have four digits." Zhou Huaijin involuntarily lowered his voice. "The numbers after that don't correspond to any latitude and longitude in the Philippines, so I guessed that they could refer to a street and house number in that postcode—in other words, it wasn't a product bar code, it was an address.

"I went to find that address—it wasn't easy. After all, it had been decades. Some streets had been torn down, some had changed. I changed guides three times. I really spent a lot of time on it, then finally found out where the person who'd lived at that address before had moved to. My mother had probably imagined that as soon as she passed away, Zhou Junmao would treat me unfavorably, and I could take what she had left for me. But she didn't expect that Zhou Junmao wouldn't have tried to harm me, and I'd still be passing my days in the Zhou Clan, making no contribution at all, full of crooked means, not having looked carefully at what she'd left behind." Zhou Huaijin sighed. "But this time you could say my luck was good. The old woman is over seventy, but she's still alive, and her mind is clear. She remembers what happened back then."

Fei Du immediately followed up, "Who did you find when you investigated that address?"

"Her." Zhou Huaijin opened his phone's album and showed Fei Du a picture of himself with an old lady. "This old lady. I had a vague memory of her. When I was very little, she helped with the housekeeping at home. Then one day she suddenly disappeared without a trace. When I found her, I learned that my mom had sent her away."

"What does she have?"

"When Zhou Yahou had his heart attack, a cassette player in the house was playing music. He accidentally pressed the record key in his struggle and recorded the dialogue between Zhou Junmao and Zheng Kaifeng, who came after. My mom secretly took the tape and entrusted it to this old lady. The original is in my bag. You can listen to the audio first."

As he spoke, he pulled up the recorded audio on his phone.

First there were disordered cries on the recording; you could hear how fiercely the person in the recording was struggling, listening to the voice. It was indistinct and extremely disturbing, only stilling after a long time.—Zhou Yahou must already have been dead. After a while there came the sound of footsteps. A man's voice said, "Relax, he's dead."

"That's Zheng Kaifeng," said Zhou Huaijin.

On the recording, Zheng Kaifeng laughed from thirty-eight years ago. "President Zhou, you recoil at the crucial moment. Now that this bastard Zhou Yahou is dead, won't the property and the beauty all be yours? What are you looking so grave for?"

Another man's voice spoke somewhat hesitantly. "I'm thinking whether we've left anything out. If this attracts suspicion and the police are called to investigate, it'll go badly."

"What is there to leave out? Your sister-in-law's gone to watch a movie, the housekeepers are on vacation, and as for the two of us—we went fishing together this afternoon, did you forget? Clean it up, and we'll go!" Zheng Kaifeng gave a deranged laugh. "When I think that all of this will be mine afterwards, I... Ha! This is my fate... Hey, Zhou-ge, I don't care about the rest, but you'll have to give me the little villa."

The footsteps in the recording walked off.

Fei Du tilted his head. "The little villa? What's the implication there?"

"Zhou Yahou had a secret private villa." Zhou Huaijin put down his phone. "I spent over a week wheedling her and finally got her to talk and tell the truth about Zhou Yahou's extramarital activities that my mother couldn't accept."

Fei Du gently raised his eyebrows. "It sounds like this truth won't be anything pleasant to hear."

"Zhou Yahou liked underaged young girls." Zhou Huaijin lowered his voice and spoke with difficulty. "Especially...especially Eastern girls around thirteen or fourteen. Zhou Yahou had a villa specifically for keeping these...these..."

Fei Du asked, "Where did the girls come from?"

Zhou Huaijin was silent for a while. "From orphanages. Zhou Yahou was very 'benevolent' when he was alive. He funded a number of orphanages throughout East Asia, including in this country. He used them as a pretext so he could pick out the girls he liked."

"Is there evidence?"

"Yes." Zhou Huaijin opened the piece of luggage next to him, pulling out a kraft-paper envelope from inside. There was a stack of old photographs in the envelope.

The old photographs were spread out on the clean, simple table. An unusual floral arrangement hung out of a vase, the swirling shadows of the flowers falling along with Fei Du's gaze on these distorted old photographs.—These were four or five above-the-waist photographs of young girls. They were all very pretty, and they all had some of the fragility of malnutrition. They were dressed up in old-fashioned sexy clothing that would have looked somewhat kitschy to the aesthetic sensibilities of the time. They wore makeup and looked indescribably strange.

"You can give them to the police if you want. Everyone involved is dead, anyway.—The girls' information is on the backs of the photographs. These are Chinese. There are also Korean and Japanese ones. They're all in the trunk. The old lady's job back then was taking care of the girls at Zhou Yahou's villa. He kept the girls until they were around sixteen and had grown to about the height of an adult, and then he'd lose interest and cast them aside, send them to underground human trafficking markets. Generally...generally they died very soon..."

Zhou Huaijin couldn't quite finish speaking. He averted his gaze, covering his mouth with one hand and only going on after a long time. "Sorry... I used to think that Zhou Yahou was my biological father. When it was very hard for me, I took him as my idol... Ahem, it's rather sickening."

"There was no internet forty years ago. There's certainly no way to trace the population files and materials now, and these girls were orphans in the first place. It's very hard..." Fei Du spoke casually as he flipped through the pictures. Suddenly, he saw something; he sat up straight at once and picked up one of the photographs.

On the back of this photograph was written: "Su Hui, Heng'an Orphanage, fifteen years old."

The date was thirty-eight years ago.

Fei Du quickly turned the photograph over and looked closely at the girl's face. He could faintly see something familiar in the outlines of the features. He picked up his phone at once and took a picture.

Luo Wenzhou wasn't far from the little restaurant where they were meeting. He'd stopped the car by the road. He'd just lit a cigarette when he received the photograph Fei Du sent him. When he saw it, he froze, then sent it to a colleague at once. The efficiency of his colleague on the Criminal Investigation Team was very high; he replied ten minutes later.

"Captain Luo, where did you find this photograph? Right, this must be that Su Hui—the grandmother of the suspect Su Luozhan in the case of trafficking young girls. The work all three generations of the Su family did started with her. Su Hui's file shows that she really was an orphan, though the orphanage she stayed at when she was little broke up long ago, and after so many years, just about everyone involved is dead. It's hard to investigate precisely which orphanage it was. There is a record of her going abroad, though she returned a year later. The facial features match, though there's a bit of difference with the age. The age indicated on her ID is two years older. We can't eliminate the possibility that someone lied about her age."

In the restaurant, Fei Du held down Su Hui's photograph and asked Zhou Huaijin, "Can you tell me about this girl?"

"Yes, this girl is very crucial." Zhou Huaijin pointed at the date on the back of the photograph. "This was the last girl. Look, the date marked here is April, and Zhou Yahou died in June of that year. The old lady remembered that this girl stayed at the villa afterwards with Zheng Kaifeng."

Fei Du's brow furrowed. "In the literal sense?"

"In the literal sense," Zhou Huaijin said heavily. "Later my mother found out. She thought it was very sickening and forced Zheng Kaifeng to send the girl back here, and she brought the old lady back to work at the main residence."

Fei Du for some reason wanted to sigh—later this orphaned and helpless victim had grown into an adult and at last fulfilled her heart's desire of rising to the top of that evil "industrial chain," becoming the victimizer.

She was like a girl embraced by a vampire in Western legend; forgetting the killer, she'd become the killer.

"Last time when we parted you said to me that all our family's tragedy came from the question of who my father was. Concerning this, the old lady said that the rumor that I might be Zhou Yahou's child was spread among the domestic staff after Su Hui was sent away. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but given my understanding of Zheng Kaifeng, he was vicious, greedy, and petty. He'd do anything."

"You mean that because Mrs. Zhou sent Su Hui away, Zheng Kaifeng bore her a grudge and created the malicious rumor that you weren't Zhou Junmao's biological child." Fei Du asked, "Is there any basis for that?"

"There is. You know this field advanced earlier abroad. If Zhou Junmao had doubts about my lineage, why didn't he have a paternity test done later? It's very childish to rely entirely on guesswork."

Fei Du slowly said, "It really is out of keeping with normal practice."

Zhou Huaijin quietly said, "Zhou Junmao left a will abroad before he died. In the appendix concerning the distribution of his property, there was a paternity report, explaining why I wasn't his heir. The results of that paternity test from over twenty years ago are exactly opposed to the one you police ran."

Fei Du said, "You mean that over twenty years ago, when you were a teenager, Zhou Junmao entrusted someone to do a paternity test, but the results were falsified?"

"Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It's exactly the same as my method with Yang Bo." Zhou Huaijin smiled bitterly. "It's truly ridiculous. I went through a lot of twists and turns to find people from the company who performed the paternity test back then. Zhou Junmao entrusted it to Zheng Kaifeng."

This wasn't any kind of glorious business, and the tabloids were always looking to report scandals about wealthy families. Of course Zhou Junmao wouldn't have investigated out in the open. If he'd wanted to perform a paternity test, he would have had to privately ask an intimate confidant.

This intimate confidant had been Zheng Kaifeng, who had killed someone with him. Though evidently the intimacy between him and Zheng Kaifeng had been somewhat one-sided.

"I told you last time that there was a period when I was very afraid and thought that Zhou Junmao wanted to kill me. I only dared to close my eyes and sleep every day by taking Huaixin to my room. I always thought it was because my mom was fading and Zhou Junmao had had enough—until I saw the date on that paternity report. It was just that time."

This would have been twenty-one years ago. Zhou Huaixin had been little, Zhou Huaijin had been in a constant state of anxiety, and at the same time, it was when the Zhou Clan had been making domestic inroads on a large scale.

To pave the way for himself, Zheng Kaifeng had created a car crash, killing their competitor...

Fei Du's fingers tapped from time to time on the rim of the teacup.

Zhou Junmao had returned to the country very rarely; domestic affairs had mostly been handled by Zheng Kaifeng. As soon as Zheng Kaifeng had returned here, he'd ganged up with those people... Had that been when Zheng Kaifeng, a wolf who bit the hand that fed him pretending to be docile, had started planning to bag the Zhou Clan for his own?

Fei Du had in fact wondered before how a company like the Zhou Clan, with basically all of its bankrollers located outside of the country, would have ended up in those people's boat.

Now it seemed that there had been a layer of connection with Su Hui.

Su Hui had used her daughter Su Xiaolan to abduct young girls, sold them, then killed them and disposed of their bodies; who had helped this single mother and her daughter take care of the bodies?

Before the dumping ground at Binhai had been established, had she already been working with those people?

When Zheng Kaifeng had returned to the country many years later and found the already old and faded Su Hui, had he turned around and become one of her "customers," thus meeting the people who dealt with the bodies?

The hidden threads passed through time, tying scattered events together, faintly revealing their shapes.

But there was still a piece missing here. Fei Du could dimly sense that it was a very crucial piece.

"What about Yang Bo?" he asked suddenly. "Have you looked into Zheng Kaifeng and Yang Bo's relationship?"

"I have. Yang Bo's father died thirteen years ago. He was the responsible driver in a car crash..."

Before Zhou Huaijin could finish, Fei Du's phone suddenly began to shake uneasily.

Fei Du picked up at once. "Hello?"

"The hospital," Luo Wenzhou said quickly. "Something's happened to Yin Ping!"

CHAPTER 142 - Edmond Dantès XIII

The Second Hospital, half an hour earlier—

Tao Ran was all wrapped up in splints and bandages, lying on his back and fixed in bed, a tuft of hair still obstinately sticking up on his head; the image was somewhat funny. When Xiao Haiyang came over to see him, the hospital room was very lively. Yang Zhengfeng's little daughter Yang Xin and Chang Ning were both there.

Tao Ran had been in the hospital for a few days and could already manage to speak a few words, but he stuttered—at first the doctor in charge had been very nervous, suspecting that this was a symptom of an injury to his brain, and had sent him for a round of examination. Later he'd found that the problem wasn't with his brain, it was with the young lady. If Chang Ning wasn't there, he could speak pretty fluently.

With Chang Ning there, even Xiao Haiyang somehow felt it wouldn't be appropriate to stay long. He sat for a few minutes, determined that Tao Ran wasn't in any danger, then left along with Yang Xin.

"Xiao dage," Yang Xin called to him. Because of Yang Zhengfeng, Yang Xin automatically felt familiar with anyone wearing a uniform; they were all big brothers.

Xiao Haiyang, who wasn't used to this, responded somewhat uncomfortably.

Yang Xin shook her phone. "I ordered a few boxes of fruit and drinks to be delivered to the hospital door. Can you help me move them? I want to deliver them to the nurses' stations, here where Tao-dage is, and over there where my mom is."

While Xiao Haiyang was rather weak and unaccustomed to manual labor, he couldn't easily refuse a little girl's request. He could only silently follow Yang Xin to act as porter.

Drinks and fruit were both weighty things. After the few steps it took to get from the hospital's front door to the inpatient department, Xiao Haiyang felt that his pitifully scant muscles were about to snap. All the veins in his neck stood out as he gasped for breath; on this midwinter day, he was covered in hot sweat.

Watching this display, Yang Xin truly felt apologetic and helped him relieve some of the weight. "Let's cheat and take a shortcut.—Ah, Xiao dage, how can you catch bad guys like this?"

Xiao Haiyang couldn't spare attention to answer; he was so exhausted he couldn't catch his breath.

Yang Xin familiarly led Xiao Haiyang through turn after turn of the inpatient department. Hearing him nearly breathe out a mushroom cloud midway, she found somewhere that wasn't in the way and indicated for Xiao Haiyang to put the stuff down and rest a while. "It's right up ahead. Past this door, turn once, and you'll be there. Go to my mom's floor and say, 'This was sent by Fu Jiahui's relatives.' Go to Tao-dage's floor and say, 'This was sent by Tao Ran's relatives.' People keep track of which patient's relatives send things, and they'll be even more devoted to taking care of them.—That's what the elders taught me when my mom first got into the hospital."

The girl was just over twenty, and her father had already passed away. She and her mother depended on each other for survival, and her mother was also not long for the world.

While attending school, Yang Xin also had to come to the hospital and learn to handle everything. Xiao Haiyang had heard of her father Yang Zhengfeng. Looking at her now, he felt somewhat saddened. He searched his guts and belly for a while, then very stiffly said, "I know about your father. He was a hero."

"Whether he was a hero or not, he doesn't know about it himself, anyway." Yang Xin lowered her head, then displayed a somewhat bitter smile. "Thinking about it, heroes and villains sometimes come to the same end. They both die, and when they're dead they're both piles of rotting bones. Comparatively speaking, when they're alive, villains have it a little better, living in defiance of the laws."

Xiao Haiyang didn't know how he should respond. Her few words had stirred up his emotions. The two of them fell into awkward silence.

There was a stairwell door behind them, but very few people used it normally, and it was locked. As Xiao Haiyang exercised his stiff wrists, he zoned out staring at the glass on the stairwell door. Suddenly, he saw a person wearing the uniform of a nurse's aide hurry past.

The stairwells on this floor were locked; Xiao Haiyang hadn't expected someone would come up that way, and he couldn't resist taking another look—when he looked, he noticed that the nurse's aide was a man even taller than he was. There were very few men among the nurses and nurse's aides; when you occasionally met one or two, most of them were elderly men; you almost never saw one in his prime.

But this man had wide shoulders and a strong build. His steps were quick and he seemed to walk with the wind at his heels. From his physique, he certainly wasn't over forty.

He wore the standard uniform of a nurse's aide at the Second Hospital, and his face was firmly covered up with a mask, leaving only his eyes visible. He briefly met Xiao Haiyang's eyes, then quickly averted his gaze, nodded slightly, and hurried away.

Xiao Haiyang frowned. It may have been his mistake, but he thought that this person's gaze had been somewhat shifty.

Before Xiao Haiyang could think carefully about it, Yang Xin suddenly tugged gently at his clothes.

Xiao Haiyang gave a start. "...Yes? What did you say?"

"I was just asking," Yang Xin said, raising her chin, "isn't that suspect who hurt Tao-dage and is in the hospital now going to get out of the ICU soon? How long are you going to keep him in the hospital? Hospital fees aren't cheap."

Xiao Haiyang's expression was blank for a moment. "Yin Ping is getting out of the ICU soon? Who did you hear that from?"

Luo Wenzhou and the others had just gotten word that Yin Ping's surgery hadn't gone well and he may lose his reason...

"I heard someone commenting on it when I went to the dining hall to order food for my mom this afternoon... Hey, wait a minute!" Yang Xin was sitting on a box of beverages. She seemed to realize something. Suddenly somewhat nervous, she lowered her voice and asked, "Xiao dage, you aren't keeping it a secret, are you?"

Xiao Haiyang stared at her for two seconds, then suddenly took to his heels and ran.

Yang Xin leapt up. "Xiao dage!"

Xiao Haiyang turned his head and yelled to her, "Wait here, don't run around!"

Where had the news that Yin Ping was going to get out of the ICU come from?

Who was spreading rumors?

Why?

There were plainclothes officers patrolling around outside the ICU, and further away Fei Du's people were hanging around. Because of Yin Ping's special position, the hospital had arranged for a criminal policeman to be on duty watching in the hospital room where non-medical personnel weren't normally permitted outside of visiting hours; they wore protective clothing and took shifts around the clock.

There was still another half hour to go until the shift changed. The criminal policeman watching inside had already been on his own for three and a half hours; he couldn't avoid feeling somewhat demoralized.

This was very painful work; there was absolutely no chance of chatting or playing on your phone. You wore protective clothing and a face mask; never mind not being able to catch your breath, you also had to make sure you were quiet, pretending as much as possible that you were a wallflower, not hindering the work of the medical personnel. The third time the criminal police officer looked at his watch, he was very short on oxygen. It was inconvenient to yawn while wearing a face mask. He felt his eyelids could hardly withstand the force of gravity, nearly falling to the ground.

Someone walked in. The policeman who could hardly keep his eyes open looked up, then lowered his head in disappointment—the person who'd come in was a nurse's aide, not his colleague coming to change shifts.

The nurses on duty in the ICU came over every fifteen minutes or so to check on the patient's condition. A little nurse had recently left after making an inspection. Perhaps this nurse's aide who'd just come in hadn't seen her; he walked right over to the policeman.

When he approached, the policeman discovered that this nurse's aide was male. His face was under a mask; his eyes were curved into two ingratiating smiles.

He came over and patted the policeman's shoulder. It seemed that since the nurse wasn't there, he needed his help with something. He reached out to point behind himself.

The policeman on duty subconsciously looked the way he was pointing, and suddenly felt a chill at the bit of skin on his neck left exposed by the protective clothing. This person had stuck a syringe into him! He was horrified, but there was no time to struggle. This person was very strong; he covered his mouth with one hand and firmly held his arms. The liquid in the syringe quickly got into his veins, and the policeman's struggles became weaker and weaker. After a moment, he fell silently.

The male "nurse's aide" expressionlessly helped him into a chair he'd pulled over, then turned to Yin Ping's hospital bed.

Just then, the nurse who'd wandered away came back. Seeing a nurse's aide standing by the head of the hospital bed, she stared, looking suspicious—the work schedules of the nurse's aides were fixed; they had to be arranged together by the nurses on duty. This clearly wasn't the time for him to be here.

The nurse's steps paused slightly. Amid the din of medical equipment, she said, "Hey, you..."

The male nurse's aide ignored her sudden cry, pressing another syringe to the neck of the unconscious Yin Ping.

The nurse on duty had already instinctively felt that something was wrong. She rushed a few steps forward, saw what he was doing, and gave a start. She had no time to call anyone; her first reaction was to throw herself forward. "What are you doing!"

Xiao Haiyang's useless legs were purely for keeping his balance when he sat, but now he brought them into play, surpassing their usual level, running in a gale to the ICU.

He startled a whole circle of stalking plainclothesmen. Xiao Haiyang had run so hard his vision was going dark; he leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. "Has, has any outsider gone in?"

"You have to swipe a card to go inside. Aside from our people, only the hospital's have been in." Lang Qiao still felt somewhat angry at the sight of him, and her tone was very stiff. Then she remembered something, and her tone changed. "Right, there was just a nurse's aide..."

Xiao Haiyang's pupils contracted instantly, remembering the strange male nurse's aide who'd come up by the locked stairwell.

A doctor making the rounds was passing by. Xiao Haiyang rushed at him, grabbing the doctor's card.

"Hey, what are you doing!" The patrolling doctor stared blankly. "You can't go in there! Wait a minute!"

Brooking no argument, Xiao Haiyang charged into the ICU room.

The sound of the door bursting open mixed with the little nurse's scream.

The nurse had thrown herself at the man's hand holding the syringe; he roughly threw her off. She stumbled, her hands still uncompromisingly pulling at the man's arm. Seeing someone had come, she hurriedly shouted, "Help! He doesn't work here..."

Before the nurse could finish, she was pulled over, an arm hooking tightly around her neck, a small knife pressing against her artery. "Don't move!"

Xiao Haiyang's steps stopped instantly. For a time the two sides were deadlocked.

When Fei Du received Luo Wenzhou's call, he raised a hand to interrupt Zhou Huaijin. Zhou Huaijin watched in bewilderment as his expression became graver and graver and couldn't resist asking, "What's happened?"

"A bit of a mishap," said Fei Du.

Zhou Huaijin raised a hand at him. "I've just about finished telling you the important things. If you have something pressing to do, then go ahead, we'll meet another..."

"Zhou-xiong," Fei Du interrupted him suddenly, "are you willing to come with us as a witness?"

Zhou Huaijin paused.

"I know that the Zhou Clan has a small number of shareholders apart from you, and there's also your whole family," Fei Du said slowly. "It was already hard for you to privately investigate up to this step and to share the information with me. I understand that you don't want to get more deeply involved."

Zhou Huaijin's lips moved, uneasily meeting his gaze in the clean, narrow private room.

"You're very innocent, and Huaixin was also very innocent," Fei Du said grimly. "But your surname is Zhou. Starting from when Zhou Junmao and Zheng Kaifeng hired an assassin—starting from when they murdered Zhou Yahou, you were automatically involved. Zhou-xiong, at this stage, it's impossible to think only of yourself."

The corners of Zhou Huaijin's eyes trembled nervily. After a good while, he whispered, "You're right. Some things are predestined."

Such as him coming into the world at a very delicate moment, so even the person who bore him couldn't clearly say who his flesh and blood belonged to.

Fei Du said, "I have an intuition that the question of Yang Bo is very important."

Zhou Huaijin sucked in a breath, his fingers nearly pressing into his teacup.

Under the guise of "tourism," he'd gone alone, following the barcode Mrs. Zhou had left behind to the Philippines, then quietly returning to the country. He hadn't wanted to alert anyone. What he'd found was horrifying, the origins of a whole series of scandals about the Zhou Clan, but it had still only been to give himself an accounting; it had no other value—everyone in the story, whether pitiful or hateful, was dead.—Zhou Huaijin had sought out Fei Du rather intending to pour out his heart, so he'd arranged to meet him alone. He'd even booked a ticket to leave, planning to go to the place where Zhou Huaixin had learned to paint and live in seclusion.

"You already know the previous generation's secrets, but there's still a question that hasn't been thoroughly answered," Fei Du said. "Zheng Kaifeng arranged for Dong Qian to kill Zhou Junmao, so why did Dong Xiaoqing ignore Zheng Kaifeng at his hotel and go to the hospital to stab you?"

Zhou Huaijin stared. "Didn't you say that when Zheng Kaifeng hired him, he did it under my name to deceive..."

"The killers Zheng Kaifeng worked with have a strictly controlled membership. Not just anyone can order them around.—Zhou-xiong, are you a member of the murder club?"

"What?" Zhou Huaijin cried automatically.

"If you aren't, it's impossible for Zheng Kaifeng to have used your name," Fei Du said a word at a time. "Especially since Zheng Kaifeng's original plan was for Zhou Junmao to die in a car crash without anyone being the wiser, making everything seem like an accident. This wasn't his first time doing this kind of shady business. He'd never slipped up before, so why would he have prepared for his assassination to be discovered this time?"

Zhou Huaijin's head was full of paste. His train of thought simply couldn't follow Fei Du's words. He felt that the things he'd thought he'd understood after running around all these months had once again become so confusing he couldn't make heads or tails of them.

Fei Du looked deeply at him, then got up to go.

"Wait!"

Two minutes later, Zhou Huaijin had canceled his trip and was sitting in a car speeding towards the Second Hospital.

"I...I looked into Yang Bo's father's death thirteen years ago," Zhou Huaijin said. "He hit a seven-seat business car. Riding in the car was a certain company's work team heading to compete for a land bid. They'd had it in the bag originally."

"And it was treated as an accident?" Luo Wenzhou asked him as he drove rapidly. "It's not easy to kill everyone in a car with one hit, and for it to happen at just that time—weren't there any conspiracy theorists who thought it wasn't natural?"

"No," Zhou Huaijin said. "In fact, when this business was being dealt with, they knew it was murder. But the media wasn't well-developed then, and it was covered up. I was only able to get to the bottom of it by going through a few business partners. Yang Bo's father was called Yang Zhi. When he hit the car, there was a protest slogan against forced evictions written in red on his clothes—the target land was suspected of having been subject to forced eviction, and the Yang family were among the victims. The company bidding on the land had sent a car to inspect it more than once before this. Common people don't have any idea that tearing down and resettlement aren't the same thing as development. Yang Zhi must have mistaken the developer's car for that of the chief culprit of the forced eviction. This was later resolved by private indemnification, and it was announced as an accident."

Luo Wenzhou frowned.

"But the delicate part is that after Yang Bo's father died, his mother took the compensation money and moved away to Yan City. She lived in a high-quality estate with very high rent that reasonably speaking surpassed her spending capacity. And then she sent Yang Bo abroad to enter an education program sponsored by the Zhou Clan."

Luo Wenzhou said, "Yang Zhi's car crash wasn't in service to the Zhou Clan. Zhou Junmao and the others didn't need to pay additional compensation. Why?"

"A hostage," Fei Du said gently.

Luo Wenzhou said, "Used to threaten who?"

"A young man of ordinary abilities could probably only be used to threaten his parents." Fei Du whispered, "She moved to Yan City... What could Zheng Kaifeng use her for? Thirteen years ago..."

Suddenly Fei Du thought of something, and his eyes, always half-opened, suddenly opened wide.

CHAPTER 143 - Edmond Dantès XIV

Luo Wenzhou's ears seemed to be moonlighting as eyes; without needing to turn his head, he noticed something was off about Fei Du's expression. "What's wrong?"

"Thirteen years ago." Fei Du's voice was so faint it seemed to disappear as soon as it reached his lips. He whispered, "The first Picture Album Project was also thirteen years ago..."

Zhou Huaijin and Luo Wenzhou, one not knowing what he was talking about, and the other, while he did know, not understanding, questioned him simultaneously.

The always well-disposed Fei Du, with an answer for every question, for once ignored them. With his hands propping his chin, he was silently lost in thought for a long time, as though sinking into some remote memory.

Meanwhile, at the Second Hospital—

Xiao Haiyang blocked the door, watching the nurse's aide squeezing the nurse's neck as though he were lifting a chick.

"You can't get away." Little Glasses' lungs, nearly exploding, expelled breath very unsteadily, but his tone was firm. "Our people have this place surrounded. Even if you take a hostage and manage to get out of here, you still can't get away."

The male nurse's aide's gaze spun around very unsteadily. There was sweat on his forehead. "Go get me a car!"

"The Second Hospital isn't far from the city center. The streets are full of surveillance cameras. What's the point of a car? You won't make it out of the city before you're stopped." As Xiao Haiyang spoke, he got up his courage and went forward a step.

"Get away, or I'll kill her!"

Lang Qiao came over and saw that Xiao Haiyang's legs were still shaking. She hastily grabbed the back of his jacket and pulled him behind her.

Lang Qiao said, "If you kill her, you still won't get away. Use your brain and think—if you behave and get out here right now, your crime is only an attempt. There'll be room to deliberate. But if you dare to touch her, you'll be a carved-in-stone murderer. Think about it!"

As she spoke, she glanced at her colleague behind her. At the same time, she very skillfully plastered herself to the foot of the wall and went into the hospital room, heading directly towards the criminal.

The male "nurse's aide" subconsciously adjusted his position according to her movements, violently yelling to her, "Stop! If you come any closer I'll..."

"You've seen what state Yin Ping is in," Xiao Haiyang interrupted him from the doorway. "Even if I don't tell you, you have eyes of your own. You can see it. His surgery wasn't very successful. They don't know whether he'll live, and if he does, he may become a vegetable. And even if his luck is unusually good and he does wake up in the end, he still won't escape dementia and paralysis. Do you think he'll be able to accuse anyone? For the rest of his life, his mouth won't be good for anything but drooling—if he even has a rest of his life."

The criminal's attention was drawn to him in spite of himself.

Lang Qiao said, "Put down the knife."

Xiao Haiyang said, "Heavens, do you still not understand? Who told you that Yin Ping was going to make a full recovery soon? Clearly they lied to you."

Lang Qiao only learned of this detail when she heard Xiao Haiyang's words. She broke out in a cold sweat of fright. "Is that true?"

"It is." Xiao Haiyang's gaze didn't leave the criminal. "Would a living corpse be worth taking the risk otherwise?"

The two of them stood one on each side, their words tightly joined; sometimes what they said was completely unrelated, and sometimes it was a dialogue; it produced the effect of a babble of voices, leaving the criminal forming the third corner of the triangle hesitating about which to defend against first; his gaze vacillated back and forth, his attention dodging left and right. "Shut up! Shut up!"

Xiao Haiyang quickly took another step forward. At the same time, a few colleagues who'd come over as soon as they'd heard the news came in after him, pressing in on the "nurse's aide" with their momentum.

In his panic, the criminal instinctively turned in the direction where there were the most people and retreated, holding onto the nurse. He howled, "Get out!"

"No," Xiao Haiyang said, looking at his hand holding the knife. With his eyes fixed on that fiercely shaking hand, he said, "It's clear now that someone tricked you into throwing yourself into the net. This business is so simple. Won't you give up the liar and drag him under? Are you still planning to kidnap and kill for him?"

The criminal's hand shook more and more fiercely—he'd listened to what had been said, acknowledged that what Xiao Haiyang had said was the truth.

Xiao Haiyang looked into his eyes with a naturally played sneer. "Are you mentally handicapped?"

The "nurse's aide" stiffened. Just then, the little nurse he was holding, who perhaps had experience dealing with aggrieved patients and relatives, took advantage of his divided attention, biting the webbing between his fingers with the boldness of consummate skill; she had chosen the most opportune moment.

Faced on one side with Yin Ping, whose condition didn't agree with rumor, and on the other with Xiao Haiyang's continuous verbal attack, the criminal's mind was in turmoil; encountering a skilled bite without warning, he cried out loudly and instinctively shook her off.

The little nurse stamped on his instep. Lang Qiao called to her, "Duck!"

The nurse bent her knees in response; almost at the same time, a tray crashed down from above, knocking away the nurse's aide's knife. The nurse was scared into a scream by the loud noise passing over her head. A few criminal policemen came up together—

Fei Du's unusual-looking deep thoughtfulness was interrupted by the phone ringing. Luo Wenzhou picked up the phone on the car. Over a very unsteady signal, Lang Qiao briefly and succinctly reported how the suspect had already been taken into custody. "I'm sorry, boss. It was my slip-up. Yin Ping's condition is very unstable, they're doing rescue work again for some reason. The doctors are all saying the outlook isn't good. There are lots of people going in and out, like they're fighting for his life, we didn't..."

"Didn't I say that Yin Ping was an important witness? As soon as I slink off, you all cook this up for me." Luo Wenzhou ground his teeth when he'd heard. "Just fucking great. I guess you aren't even thinking of your bonuses anymore? How come you're all so good at saving the state money?"

Lang Qiao didn't dare to defend herself. She obediently closed her mouth and took the lecture.

"Bring him in," Luo Wenzhou said coldly. "Don't think that I can't keep an eye on you while the old men are away. I see that all of you haven't written enough self-examinations!"

When he'd said this, Luo Wenzhou hung up uncompromisingly and spun the steering wheel, irritably shifting to the turn lane.

Fei Du didn't respond. He untied his scarf, his fingers subconsciously rubbing back and forth over his neck, his frown deepening.

As one of the important witnesses, Zhou Huaijin of course needed someone to receive him. At the City Bureau, Luo Wenzhou first found someone to lead him in, then familiarly returned the car to its parking space. When he'd cut the engine, he didn't rush to get out of the car. In the remaining warmth, he turned and pulled away Fei Du's hand, which was about to break the skin. "Tell me what you're thinking."

"I'm the key figure who framed Gu Zhao fourteen years ago," Fei Du opened in a frightening manner. "First, with Gu Zhao entirely unwary, I grasped which way his investigation was trending, then started in on his informers. Informers live in the grey areas on the edges and are doomed not to stay there long; they have their own plans. Whether they were threatened or enticed, they could all be put to good use—but the risk in this process was great. What if among them was one idiot who didn't know what was good for him and told Gu Zhao about this? As soon as Gu Zhao heard, he'd know who I was."

Luo Wenzhou gave a "wow."

"So what should I do?" Fei Du asked quietly. His fingers flitted over his upper lip. While there was no expression on his face, there seemed to be a smile in the tail-end of his words, as though he really was that monster hiding in the shadows, turning everyone over in the palm of his hand. "I need to make my target betray Gu Zhao before I reveal myself."

Luo Wenzhou thought about it. "For example, something like making the target informer think that you were a villain from The Louvre and Gu Zhao's investigation had alerted the enemy, then forcing the informer to reveal Gu Zhao's plans?"

"Yes. I'm Gu Zhao's secret partner. Of course I know Gu Zhao's plans. It would be very easy to know whether they were telling the truth, and very easy to screen for traitors," Fei Du said gently. "As a police officer, of course I'm familiar with the informers closely related to the City Bureau. While Yin Chao and Yin Ping are identical twins, they're far apart in disposition, so...if Yin Ping was impersonating Old Cinder, why didn't I notice?"

"Because he likely didn't have direct contact with Yin Ping at first, and his subordinates wouldn't necessarily be familiar with Old Cinder." Luo Wenzhou's eyes turned, and he quickly said, "As for afterwards, because 'Old Cinder' became his partner in perjury and framing, even if the mole noticed that his performance was peculiar, he wouldn't think much of it."

"Afterwards, to make this thing seamless, I'd quietly take care of the witnesses, send them to other countries to lie low or simply kill them on the way... It's all possible. Only the fake Old Cinder was the fish who slipped out of the net. In other words, it's likely that Yin Ping realized the danger. When he had done the business, he wasn't greedy. He immediately broke contact, faked Yin Chao's disappearance, and went back to being a sooty-faced boiler attendant himself." Fei Du looked up. "So the question arises, why would I allow Yin Chao to 'disappear' without going to investigate his family?"

Luo Wenzhou froze. "You mean to say it's likely that the chief culprit behind framing Gu Zhao may have thought that Old Cinder didn't have any material evidence pointing to him!"

"It's likely that Yin Ping hid himself because he sensed something, but if you want to say that he had some material evidence, I've just been thinking about the whole process carefully, and I think it would be very hard." Fei Du had switched over which person he was speaking in and had also returned to his ordinary tone of voice. "Then why is the person behind the scenes in such a rush to eliminate Yin Ping? First he exposed his contact, and then he sent another one of his people to the hospital to be caught by the police."

Luo Wenzhou's temples began to ache.

Fei Du slowly said, "If I haven't guessed wrong, then it's likely you'll be able to reach an important suspect today. This person is undoubtedly in a high, powerful position. As soon as something happens, it'll create a major scandal impacting the system's ability to win public trust."

Fei Du's words were a prophecy—

At this delicate moment when the gaze of the investigation team was firmly fixed on the City Bureau, the "nurse's aide" who had snuck into the hospital confessed.

"I did used to be a nurse's aide... I worked at the Second Hospital, so I was very familiar with it. I needed money desperately, there was really no other way... I was...I was possessed. At first they made me sneak into the Second Hospital to keep an eye on that Yin Ping... So today I heard someone remark that he was going to wake up, and they said he may have killed someone, so as soon as his condition stabilized a little the police would take him away. When I found out, I thought of a way to notify my employers, and they told me to...told me to..."

"For money?" Lang Qiao closed her notebook, looking at the man with a disbelieving expression. "Do you know what kind of crime murder is?"

The man lowered his head, stammering.

Xiao Haiyang said, "Who told you to keep an eye on Yin Ping? Who ordered you to kill him? Did you see this person?"

"Two guys came to my house with money. They said it was their boss. I...I saw a car stopped outside."

An investigator watching the interrogation over the security camera feed turned to Luo Wenzhou. "Captain Luo, please coordinate this as soon as possible. We want the security camera footage from around the suspect's house transferred over."

With matters at this stage, Luo Wenzhou could only follow instructions.—They turned up five million in cash at the "hospital killers"'s residence, and, at the same time, a surveillance camera nearby that had caught a luxury sedan appearing around the time and location the criminal had told them; with the criminal's identification, they determined that it was the car that had stopped outside his building then.

The high-definition surveillance camera had caught the driver turning his head to speak to someone sitting in the backseat. This person was leaning forward slightly, and his features were clearly distinguishable—it was the City Bureau's former director-general Zhang Chunjiu, who had transferred to an advisory post at the beginning of the year.

And the car he was sitting in, worth six million on the market, was a business vehicle registered in the name of his older brother Zhang Chunling's conglomerate.

Zhang Chunjiu and Gu Zhao had started work at the City Bureau at the same time. The two of them had always been very friendly. Zhang Chunjiu had been the backbone of the City Bureau's Criminal Investigation Team when Gu Zhao had come to grief; he would have had every opportunity to place the fingerprint mold and the cash without anyone being the wiser. After Gu Zhao died, Yang Zhengfeng had borne the principal responsibility as his superior and had been disciplined, and Zhang Chunjiu had taken over Yang Zhengfeng's position; he'd been the ultimate beneficiary of Gu Zhao's death. And the field work system that was suspected of having been leaked and the tampered-with security camera equipment had all been put in place during his term of office.

Most importantly, when they investigated his record, they found that the reason that an exception had been made to transfer Zhang Chunjiu to the City Bureau was that he had rendered a tremendous meritorious service in the jurisdiction he'd originally belonged to—he'd arrested a gang of robbers and murderers who'd fled through twenty provinces. The above-mentioned gang was very crafty; they'd been wanted throughout the country for half a year, and each time they'd slipped away. But by some coincidence, they'd fallen into the hands of Zhang Chunjiu, at that time a young nobody!

Had he really been so perceptive, his professional abilities so unsurpassed?

If he'd been so awesome when he was young, then why had he become more confused the older he got? During the period he was in office managing the City Bureau, the Flower Market District Sub-Bureau had nearly become a drug den, and he'd had no idea.

All of it could be explained; the investigation team was extremely excited. They sent two people to personally go with Luo Wenzhou and his people to "invite" old Director Zhang from his residence. And while you wouldn't know without looking, once you'd seen, you'd be astonished—old Director Zhang was living in a Yan City estate famous for its mansions. The two cars parked outside were worth over ten million. Even the teacups in the house were from some luxury brand, and there was a whole row of leather goods costing over a hundred thousand a piece in a cabinet. It was poles apart from the low-key and plain lifestyle he'd modeled at the City Bureau in former days.

What was all this "only wearing his uniform," "carrying his own water," "his private phone wasn't even a smartphone"... All of it now simply seemed like an over-the-top pompous joke.

CHAPTER 144 - Edmond Dantès XV

"Your family really does have means, Director Zhang. What's the cost per square meter in that estate you live in? I've heard that you can't even get in to see the houses if you don't have assets of a hundred million."

"The house belongs to my older brother. My job transferred this year, and the place I go to work at is a little further away. My older brother is getting on in years and was planning to move to a more peaceful place, so he's temporarily letting me use his residence in the city for two years. I'll be retiring soon, anyway."

"Your older brother? There's so much affection between the two of you?"

"My older brother is ten years older than me. He practically raised me. If you said he was like my father, it wouldn't be overstating it. I'm really on rather familiar terms with him. He went out to work young, to do business and save up some resources... To my shame, I haven't given this business very careful thought. I only looked to what was convenient. Perhaps I've made a somewhat bad impression—but I can guarantee that my brother's business hasn't come into the slightest contact with my professional duties, and I've never used my position to do him any favors. If the organization thinks that my private life is too extravagant and violates discipline, I'll accept that and reflect on returning to my home as soon as possible...but apart from that, my conscience is clear in others respects."

The investigator smiled. "All right, we'll verify that.—I suppose you know why you've been asked here?"

"I'm aware."

"So, what would you like to say?"

Zhang Chunjiu sat upright in his chair. As before, he was lean; the leanness of middle age had its own sense of severity. The outlines of his forehead were rather deep. Over time, a long wrinkle had been pressed into it. In all ways, this severe face was hard to connect to the generous, open, good-tempered old big brother in the memories of Director Lu and the others. Looking at him, you couldn't resist having misgivings—how much could a person change over twenty years?

What had changed him?

"I haven't been able to get Lao Lu on the phone these last few days, and I thought it wasn't right, so I tried calling a few other old friends and found that none of them could pick up. Even Lao Pan, who's gone to school, is the same. So I've been thinking that it would be my turn soon." Zhang Chunjiu picked up a teacup and drank a mouthful. His expression didn't change. "I don't know what I should tell you. Why don't you go ahead and ask?"

"Then we won't stand on ceremony." The investigator's smile was a needle in silk floss. "It sounds like since you transferred away, you've remained in regular contact with your former colleagues?"

"Not regular, but this period of time has been rather special. For one thing, there's Gu Zhao's case being investigated anew, and for another, Lao Yang's wife—widow—is sick and staying in the hospital, so we old men have been calling each other rather industriously."

"Oh, yes, Gu Zhao's case." The investigator pushed at his glasses, overlooking the other part. "Do you still remember the details clearly? It was fourteen years ago."

Zhang Chunjiu was silent for a while. "Gu Zhao... Gu Zhao's case was a thorn in all our hearts. No one believed it then, but the evidence was conclusive. It wasn't up to us to believe it or not. To tell you the truth, I didn't believe that Gu Zhao could do that sort of thing and went to talk to my superiors many times, without daring to disclose it—my brothers were demoralized, and the leaders were pressed on all sides. I was caught between them."

At this point, an expression between weariness and indignation showed on his face. "It was hard... I never expected that after so many years, it would be investigated anew one day. If Lao Yang knew..."

The investigator seamlessly interrupted him. "Director Zhang, if Gu Zhao didn't solicit bribes and commit a violent act back then, then who do you think is responsible for him being wronged all those years ago?"

"I can't judge my elders' actions behind their backs, but Gu Zhao's informers collectively perjured themselves, so the other side must have known what he was doing inside and out... That shows it's likely someone was disclosing secrets here, setting him up..." The fold between Zhang Chunjiu's brows deepened. He was silent for a long time, then said, "I don't know who it was, and I'm not willing to suspect anyone. You can go ahead and suspect me—but if you want me to say that any of my brothers from back then could have been a traitor, it's the same as wanting me to believe it's true that Gu Zhao killed someone and solicited bribes. I can't do it."

The investigator wasn't at all moved by this "deep affection between brothers." He unfeelingly pulled out the main subject. "Director Zhang, do you remember an informer from back then whose codename was Old Cinder, real name Yin Chao?"

Zhang Chunjiu nodded. "Yes, wasn't he the one who took Gu Zhao into The Louvre? I remember it clearly. Not long after it happened, he disappeared. I always thought something was off about him. Some years ago I had a young colleague who was transferred to South Bend for work. I knew that Yin Chao still had relatives there and asked this colleague to keep an eye on him for me, and in case Yin Chao returned home to visit his relatives, to arrest him at once."

The investigator at up a little straighter and followed up, "What's the name of your young colleague?"

"Kong Weichen."

"When this Kong Weichen took a few criminal policemen from the City Bureau to investigate Yin Ping, he called you. What did he say?"

"He told me about Yin Ping forging Yin Chao's signature to get the money from their house being torn down, and that they were just going to investigate. He also said that if they got news about Yin Chao, he would definitely notify me. But afterwards I've been unable to contact him." Zhang Chunjiu seemed to realize something was wrong. "What is it? What's happened to Kong Weichen?"

"We have reason to believe that the 'Old Cinder' who went into The Louvre with Gu Zhao was in fact Yin Ping, and also that he held evidence about Gu Zhao's case. But when they went to find him, Yin Ping fled to avoid punishment. In the course of the pursuit, the Criminal Investigation Team's whereabouts were revealed, and two pickups loaded with explosive materials suddenly charged out, wanting to silence—"

Zhang Chunjiu said, "What!"

The investigator revealed the dagger inside the map, suddenly restraining the genial smile on his face. "The other side acted faster than the police force. We have reason to suspect that they received their information before Criminal Police Officer Tao Ran reported to his superior. And among the people present at the time who knew the circumstances, only Kong Weichen had made contact with the outside, and the person he contacted was you. Director Zhang, would you like to explain?"

"You suspect that I..." At this point, Zhang Chunjiu suddenly bit his tongue, forcing down the startled fury on his face. As calmly and evenly as possible, he said, "When Kong Weichen called me, he only said that they were going to Yin Ping's house. He didn't mention that Yin Ping was...that Yin Ping..."

Repeating this name twice, Zhang Chunjiu in the end couldn't restrain himself. His expression showed a trace of disbelief. "How could Yin Ping have become Old Cinder? When did he begin impersonating him? Didn't anyone notice at the time? Who told you this? Is there a basis?"

The investigator met his eyes expressionlessly for a moment, trying to read something in his face. "Director Zhang, did you really not know? Are you acquainted with this person?"

Saying so, he pulled out a photograph and placed it in front of Zhang Chunjiu.

Zhang Chunjiu seemed to still be immersed in the bizarre information he had just heard. He quickly looked down and glanced at the photograph. "No."

"No? Take a closer look." The investigator leaned forward. "Yin Ping suffered a stroke because of a collision. He was taken to the hospital for life-saving measures and still isn't out of danger. Yesterday afternoon, this person infiltrated Yin Ping's hospital room disguised as a nurse's aide and attempted once again to kill him in order to silence him. He failed, and we arrested him—the killer identified you as the one who incited him to do this."

Zhang Chunjiu was stupefied. After a moment, seeming caught between laughter and tears, he pointed to himself. "Me?"

"We found five million in cash in this killer's residence. It was the money that paid for Yin Ping's life."

Zhang Chunjiu's gaze suddenly sharpened. "How much?"

"Five million."

An indescribable expression suddenly flashed over Zhang Chunjiu's face. After a moment, he gave a bitter laugh and let out a long breath, his upright posture crumbling. He leaned heavily back in his chair. "The evidence we found under Gu Zhao's bed back then was five million in cash... It's been fourteen years. What, is it still the same number?"

The investigator carefully weighed his expression. "Where were you on the eleventh?"

"I'm not sure." Zhang Chunjiu rubbed the center of his brow, rubbing a third fold into his eyelids. The weariness in his face deepened. "Could I have a hint?"

"Around two o'clock in the afternoon on the eleventh, you were seen riding in a private car near the Among the Poplars Estate. Is that right?"

"Among the Poplars Estate? I don't know it." Zhang Chunjiu's face was suspicious. "The eleventh...last Monday? My car was under the restriction that day, I borrowed a car from home. I passed by Lu'an Bridge. I think there were some residential communities around, but I didn't notice what they were called."

"Where were you going?"

"First I was going to the Second Hospital to see Lao Yang's family. On the way I remembered that I hadn't bought anything, and that wasn't suitable, so I had the driver get off the highway at Lu'an Bridge. There's a rather big shopping center there," Zhang Chunjiu said. "I threw the receipt somewhere, but you should be able to investigate the security cameras near the checkout at the mall. When I'd bought what I needed, I went to the hospital. Lao Yang's widow Fu Jiahui and his daughter Yang Xin can confirm it. You can go ask them."

The corner of the investigator's eye twitched slightly—the estate the hospital killer lived in was called Among the Poplars, and it really was near the Lu'an Bridge, but it was very small, and the house were old-fashioned. The signs on the buildings were mottled and unclear, and there weren't even any walls around the estate.

The investigator had asked the question this way on purpose, because ordinarily if a person had just been passing by, it would have been hard for him to notice what a common six-story building was called. If Zhang Chunjiu had directly answered, "I was just passing by," then that would have been very suspicious, but...

Was Zhang Chunjiu pretending? Then he was too cautious, and his deliberations too comprehensive; it was frightful.

Having come to Director Zhang, the investigation wouldn't be left to the Criminal Investigation Team. This questioning was being carried on in secret. Only Luo Wenzhou had been specially approved to come listen in. The investigator asked all the questions four or five times, full of countless pitfalls; it took over three hours in all. Both the questioner and the one being questioned were unbearably exhausted, and even Luo Wenzhou, listening from the sidelines, couldn't resist lighting a cigarette when he walked out the door.

Heavily weighed down, he focused and pondered amidst a cloud of smoke. Then he crossed the street—waiting there was an SUV so tall it had no friends.

As soon as Luo Wenzhou pulled open the door, before he could get into the passenger's seat, Xiao Haiyang leaned forward impatiently from the back seat. "Captain Luo, I now think that this matter is questionable. Director Zhang may have been framed!"

Luo Wenzhou glanced at him, brought his frozen hands close to the car air-conditioning's warm breeze, and slowly said, "Earlier, you were the one wishing you could push Director Zhang up onto the guillotine, and now you're the one saying he's been unjustly accused... Little Glasses, it's fortunate you're a commoner in the modern era. If you transmigrated into a prince in a feudal society, how many wrongfully murdered spirits would there be on your hands?"

Xiao Haiyang took no notice of what Luo Wenzhou was saying to him. He lowered his head and pulled a folder out of his bag. Pointing to two photographs inside it, he said, "Look, this is the cash found in that killer's house, and the other photograph is the five million found in Uncle Gu's house. I found it in the sealed old case file.—Large sums of money are usually piled up in stacks of ten thousand to make it easier to check. Banks tie them in paper strips. But the cash found in the killer's house is all stacked together, exactly the same as the material evidence from fourteen years ago!"

Lang Qiao, next to him, said, "Yeah, I asked the hospital killer about it, and he said the money was like that when it came, and he spent ages counting it to be sure."

Luo Wenzhou took the photographs, frowning deeply.

Out of nowhere, Xiao Haiyang suddenly said, "Captain Luo, I'm sorry, I was wrong."

When he spoke, even Fei Du turned around from the driver's seat. The six eyes of the three people in the car all fell on Xiao Haiyang, as though marveling at the once-in-a-thousand-years spectacle of an iron tree blossoming.

Xiao Haiyang nervily pushed at his glasses, lips pursing into a line. Whether nervous or uneasy, he seemed to be shaking slightly all over. He opened his mouth and let loose a barrage. "I was wrong. I shouldn't have acted subjectively and rashly, reaching a conclusion after only getting a bit of surface-level evidence, casually accusing a hero. And I shouldn't have..."

Luo Wenzhou interrupted him. "Did you write that just now?"

Xiao Haiyang blurted out an answer: "Last night."

When he'd said it, he realized at once that he'd done something stupid and immediately shut his mouth. Lang Qiao snickered next to him. Xiao Haiyang, ill at ease, picked at the seam of his pants, seeming ready to evaporate off the face of the earth.

"Our team doesn't have a custom of reciting entire personal reflections from memory. When this is over, just remember to invite some people to a meal." Luo Wenzhou thought about it, then added, "You have to cook it yourself. We'll see based on what you've cooked whether you're sincere or not."

Xiao Haiyang's face was a blank. He seemed to want to season himself and jump right into the steamer.

"I listened to Director Zhang's statement. Though the evidence is very unfavorable to him, all his explanations basically make sense." Luo Wenzhou became stern. "Either he's in a very high class, or he's been set up.—Anyway, if he really is so powerful, he shouldn't have left behind so many gaps in two unsuccessful attempts to kill Yin Ping."

Lang Qiao asked, "So you're saying someone set him up, and it's the same method that was used to set up Gu Zhao? Why? Who has he offended?"

Luo Wenzhou shook his head, indicating for Fei Du to drive home.

The file for Gu Zhao's case had only recently been declassified when the investigation had been reopened. Who would know the detail about the arrangement of the cash? And after Director Zhang was investigated, the last person involved in the case would have been brought in. The investigation team wouldn't publicize how they were dealing with this, and it would be hard for them to interfere...

This increasingly bewildering old case had reached an impasse.

Just then, Fei Du suddenly spoke. "The first Picture Album Project started about a year after Gu Zhao's case. The people in the Picture Album group had the right to request case files—did those include Gu Zhao's case?"

Luo Wenzhou said, "You're saying..."

"The mysterious head of the project," Fei Du said. "Did he really die?"

Luo Wenzhou looked at him deeply. Hindered by Lang Qiao and Xiao Haiyang's presence, he only perfunctorily said, "It's been too long. We'll have to ask when Director Lu and the others get back."

But faint misgivings rose in his mind.—On the surface, the Picture Album Project seemed to be entirely separate from Gu Zhao's case. Why did Fei Du keep mentioning it? Why was he unable to let it go? Why had he even set aside his enormous family business to take part in the second Picture Album Project?

CHAPTER 145 - Edmond Dantès XVI

"Boss," Lang Qiao asked, "now that the investigation team has taken him, what do we do?"

In fact, Luo Wenzhou was also at a loss, but he couldn't show it in front of his youthful subordinates. He muttered to himself for a moment, then said, "That moronic hospital killer is still in our hands. Keep interrogating him. Didn't he say two men came to bring him the money? We haven't found a hair from either of their heads. Who knows whether he was making it up?"

Lang Qiao hurriedly got out a small notebook—it was the bad habit trained into her by examination-oriented education; when she felt helpless, she'd passionately take notes, creating the false impression that she was working hard, as though if she sat and waited it would spontaneously become the truth.

"Also, find some guys to follow that driver of Director Zhang's, plant some eavesdropping devices on him," Luo Wenzhou said as he arranged his thoughts. "Xiao Haiyang, keep waiting for results from the material evidence. If it was Kong Weichen who leaked information when Tao Ran and the others were pursuing Yin Ping, he wouldn't have obviously called Director Zhang. They're both our own people. Of course they would know what we'd do if anything happened. They wouldn't have left such obvious evidence—so there must be some other plot involved in Yin Ping's car crash."

This time, Xiao Haiyang at last had no dissenting views. He nodded affirmatively.

"Also, find an opportunity to go to the rehab center," Luo Wenzhou added. "If you can, have a chat with Ma Xiaowei."

Lang Qiao and Xiao Haiyang were very confused by this request, looking back at him helplessly.

Luo Wenzhou said, "The time when Ma Xiaowei appeared and the secrets he 'inadvertently' disclosed to us currently don't look too likely to have all been coincidence. These major cases have all happened since Director Zhang was transferred. If there's premeditation involved here, it's likely it started then, and Ma Xiaowei was definitely a participant."

Xiao Haiyang was as impatient as a fire. He quickly said, "I'll go now!"

"Where are you going? Visiting hours are over. Go tomorrow.—Have you thought about how you're going to question him? What's the rush? Don't you know that sharpening the axe won't interfere with cutting firewood?"

The criminal policemen who'd been prepared to work throughout the Spring Festival idly got off work on time. Fei Du dropped Xiao Haiyang and Lang Qiao off at their respective homes, then went to the hospital to bring the injured Tao Ran something to eat, dictating a few lines he could use to appeal to girls; he was dragged home midway by Luo Wenzhou, who couldn't stand to listen to it.

Then, as though nothing were the matter, he undertook part-time work as a supermarket cart pusher, porter, and wallet-carrier, accompanying Luo Wenzhou to the supermarket to buy ingredients and cat food. His manner was calm and natural, just as usual.

Especially when it was time to go to sleep. There was for once no need for Luo Wenzhou to coax and plead—he said it twice, and Fei Du turned off his computer.

Fei Du had rather bad living habits. He didn't sleep at night and would also get up early in the morning, citing the work schedules of people from Chicken Soup for the Soul such as "Buffett" and "Jobs" and "Kobe."

When he'd just gotten out of the hospital and didn't have much energy it had been a little better; he'd lie down after a little torment. But after some meticulous nursing by Luo Wenzhou, it seemed there was another vigorous Luo Yiguo in the house—unless Luo Wenzhou suddenly woke in the middle of the night, when he reached out on waking, eight or nine out of ten times he'd come up empty. Fortunately, President Fei had a better disposition than President Guo and could get himself up; he didn't harm others by acting as an alarm clock.

Luo Wenzhou looked at him in surprise. "What's wrong with you today? Are you feeling unwell? Did you catch a cold? Or did you eat something that disagreed with you?"

"If I don't listen to you, you resort to force." Fei Du touched his face helplessly. "If I do listen to you, you suspect that I'm sick... Beloved concubine, you're too capricious."

A trace of a smile floated at the corners of Luo Wenzhou's eyes. Then he grabbed Fei Du's wrist and spoke with a double meaning: "Am I capricious, or is your lordship's heart hard to fathom?"

Fei Du stared. Luo Wenzhou looked at him with a slightly grave gaze. "Your mood hasn't been right these last couple of days. What is it?"

With a smile that wasn't quite a smile, Fei Du avoided replying. "My mood's not right? I'm always 'in the mood' when I see you."

Luo Wenzhou: "..."

A certain person was using lines on him that he'd just gotten through teaching Tao Ran, not even changing a punctuation mark. Did he think he was so deaf he hadn't heard?

Seeing that Fei Du once again refused to speak properly, Luo Wenzhou suddenly raised his arms and grabbed him around the waist, lifting his feet off the ground.

"Shoes!" Fei Du said. "Wait, my shoes!"

Hearing movement, Luo Yiguo saw an opportunity and leapt over, picking up Fei Du's dropped slipper in its mouth like a rare toy, letting itself go happily tearing and biting at it.

Luo Wenzhou uncompromisingly closed the bedroom door, pressing him against the door in midair. "Your shixiong isn't so old yet he'd make you dirty your feet walking on the ground. What do you want shoes for?"

President Fei's amorous history didn't include any direct practical experience with this position. He was a little flustered. While he knew that if he fell it wouldn't kill him, he still very insecurely reached out to support himself against the doorknob, forcing a smile. "Could I ask you to switch to something not so stimulating? I'm afraid it'll be tiring for..."

Luo Wenzhou narrowed his eyes at him. Fei Du was good at reading expressions; he wisely swallowed back the word "you." His throat moved. Displaying adaptability, he abandoned a man's self-respect and corrected himself: "...me."

Luo Wenzhou looked up and met his eyes for a moment, then slowly drew near, gently rubbing the tip of Fei Du's nose.

Fei Du lowered his head to kiss him, but Luo Wenzhou dodged back, unfeelingly saying, "Let go of the doorknob. You can't put your hands anywhere but on me. Who told you to demonstrate chin-ups?"

Fei Du: "..."

Luo Wenzhou said, "Or do you want the handcuffs?"

Fei Du was normally very indulgent towards him. He didn't have the heart to spoil his fun. Choosing the lesser of two evils, he made the position as secure as possible, holding Luo Wenzhou's shoulders and clamping his legs around his waist.

Luo Wenzhou slowly used the tips of his teeth to pull open the bathrobe hanging loosely in front of his chest. "What am I to you?"

Fei Du feigned astonishment. "Are you disappointed I didn't formally buy you a diamond? How about I go order a pigeon egg now?"

Luo Wenzhou said, "You can't get full eating a pigeon egg. I want chicken eggs, two of them."

Fei Du: "..."

He really was a true man who only wanted to eat and sleep his fill.

"Since I'm worth two chicken eggs—" Luo Wenzhou's gaze roved around Fei Du's chest. He was young, after all; some time had passed, and the electric shock scars were hardly visible. Without the messy scrawl of a stuck-on tattoo to cover it, his chest was thin and fair, with almost an alluring trace of youthfulness.

Such a thin chest; such a heavy heart.

When Luo Wenzhou had looked enough, he finished his long drawn-out sentence: "—can you trust me?"

This question was a softball. Fei Du answered without thinking: "How could I not... hss."

Luo Wenzhou had a premonition that the conversation might not go smoothly; consequently he ground his teeth against him.

"Think carefully, Fei Du. I'll give you another chance."

The activities of his lower body normally didn't rise above Fei Du's neck. His brain was very clear; he immediately realized that Luo Wenzhou was implying something, and thoughts spun through his mind. Looking down from on high, he freed up one hand to raise Luo Wenzhou's chin. "What, do you feel uneasy because I haven't been speaking so much lately and forcing a stack of ideas into your ears?"

The tips of Luo Wenzhou's eyebrows moved. "I feel like you're hiding something from me."

This sort of phrase is usually an omen of domestic crisis. Fei Du earnestly recalled for a moment. "When I've assigned tasks to Lu Jia and the others lately, it's all been right in front of you. I haven't secretly plotted against anyone's life, and I haven't wanted to go pull out Fei Chengyu's breathing tube. I've observed the law and discipline, haven't touched a drop of alcohol, oh, and I've acceded to your every plea. I don't think there's anything I've been hiding?"

Luo Wenzhou held him with one hand, the other hand very improperly reaching under his bathrobe. He touched somewhere that made Fei Du stiffen all over. Suspended in midair, feeling neither here nor there, he was nervous and impatient. "Shixiong, are you...planning to use torture to extort a confession?"

"That's right," Luo Wenzhou said slowly. "When Zhou Huaijin mentioned 'thirteen years ago,' you said, 'the Picture Album Project.' Today in the car when we were discussing whether Director Zhang was framed, you mentioned the Picture Album Project again. Even when you were getting close to me from ulterior motives, your ostensible motive was restarting the Picture Album Project."

Fei Du laughed. "When I was getting close to you from ulterior motives, my motive was your good looks."

"..." Luo Wenzhou choked. "Are you stealing my lines? You pick up bad influences quickly."

"The Picture Album Project planned to establish a record of criminals. Though it was led by the school, if you pay attention to the list of participants, you'll find that they were nearly all frontline police officers who took part in Gu Zhao's case—that is, they were suspects." Fei Du gasped; at the end of his endurance, he grabbed Luo Wenzhou's groping hand. "...Darling, if you keep doing that, I won't be able to keep talking."

"But you didn't come because of Gu Zhao's case."

"I remember I told you..."

"I remember, too," Luo Wenzhou interrupted him. "The first time, you told me that you had an intuition that your mom's death was connected to Fei Chengyu, and you wanted to know why you'd have that intuition, so you wanted to trace back your memories from when you were little. The second time, you told me that actually you knew your mom had killed herself, and you knew why she'd done it, and that you faintly suspected Fei Chengyu was involved in some shady business. The third time, when we went after Lu Guosheng, in the basement of your house, you repeated to me what Fei Chengyu had said. You remembered what had happened thirteen years ago with perfect clarify. You didn't need to trace anything back."

Fei Du stared blankly. He hadn't expected Luo Wenzhou to remember every word of nonsense he'd said with perfect clarify.

Luo Wenzhou struggled free of his hand, clutching the tender flesh between Fei Du's legs, grinding back forth. Gritting his teeth slightly, he asked, "Can you tell me now what the truth is among your self-contradictory words?"

Fei Du was a silent for a good while. Then he suddenly grabbed the back of Luo Wenzhou's head, lowered his head, and kissed him. He seemed to naturally know how to stir up emotion; the kiss wasn't intense, but it made a person have the feeling of being deeply loved by him.

It was an unhurried, precise, and perfect deep feeling.

But just as a succession of coincidences couldn't be accidental, this always perfectly precise expression couldn't be a natural revelation. Luo Wenzhou suddenly flared up a little, tearing away the loose clothing hanging on Fei Du's body, changing zero distance to negative distance. Only when he felt Fei Du's pulse change sharply did he have some sense that he was truly holding him in his arms.

Fei Du seemed about to fall asleep when he carried him to bed and laid him down. Luo Wenzhou kissed the center of his brow. His intellect returned, and he thought, "I still haven't gotten an answer."

Just then, Fei Du suddenly spoke. "Not everything I told you those three times was made up."

His voice was a little hoarse, gently rubbing the eardrums. Luo Wenzhou paused, made a sound, and stretched his legs out onto the little armchair next to the bed.

"I really am investigating the Picture Album to trace back to things from when I was little. I don't remember completely what happened in the basement, and I have an intuition that the part left out is very important."

Luo Wenzhou said, "I thought your memory wasn't any worse than Xiao Haiyang's."

"I don't have an eidetic memory." Fei Du smiled quickly. "Actually, I went into Fei Chengyu's basement without permission twice. The first time it was entirely by chance. I dropped something and went to get it, and he hadn't locked the door. That time I got in and saw the Picture Album Project roster. While I was flipping through it, Fei Chengyu returned. I hid in the little cabinet under his bookcase, and luckily he didn't find me."

Luo Wenzhou for some reason felt there was something wrong with these words, but before he could think closely, Fei Du continued, "Little boys naturally seek stimulus, are curious and rebellious. Having gotten in once, I wanted to do it a second time, so I tried by any means possible to get the code to the basement.—It wasn't easy. Fei Chengyu was very careful. So it was half a year later that I succeeded in getting into that secret basement a second time. I saw the research paper concerning the victims of vicious crimes arranged on his desk."

Luo Wenzhou said, "The paper written by Fan Siyuan, the head of the first Picture Album Project?"

"Yes."

Luo Wenzhou frowned.—The first Picture Album Project had gone wrong midway. It hadn't been long after Gu Zhao's case. The City Bureau really couldn't have taken another scandal. As soon as they'd found something was wrong, they'd urgently called it to a halt, and all the personnel who'd participated had been investigated. It had been handled very quickly—

"I think that it was less than half a year from the time the first Picture Album Project launched to the time it was called to a halt," Luo Wenzhou said. "Why did Fei Chengyu's interest last so long?"

"I turned on his computer. The code was the same as for the door. I saw a file on the desktop called 'Picture Album,' but I couldn't open it, because the door code didn't work."

"You mean that the Picture Album project is connected to Fei Chengyu?" Luo Wenzhou asked. "And then what?"

"Then I don't recall very clearly, but..." Fei Du suddenly felt his throat tighten. He turned his head away and coughed twice. "But...ahem..."

At first Luo Wenzhou thought that he'd choked while speaking, but he very quickly noticed something was wrong—Fei Du couldn't stop coughing.

He quickly went to hold Fei Du up, patting his back. "What's the matter? Did you catch a chill? What did I tell you!"

Fei Du was coughing so hard he couldn't catch his breath, the veins nearly standing out at the corners of his forehead. It only calmed after a long time. Luo Wenzhou brought over a glass of warm water. "Drink a little. Don't be in a hurry to take medicine for a cold. It may work to wait it out. We'll see if it gets worse."

"I only roughly remember that Fei Chengyu suddenly returned home for some reason and found that I was in his basement. I think he was very angry. After a huge explosion, he emptied the basement," Fei Du said with some effort. "But...when I think about it, it seems that that's when I started to have a concrete idea of what he was doing. I must have accidentally seen something very important in the basement that day."

CHAPTER 146 - Edmond Dantès XVII

It was normal for an adult not to remember things that had happened before he was ten years old. For example, Luo Wenzhou persisted in believing that silly things like him seizing a coal heap while wielding a toy gun when he was little were fabricated by Comrade Mu Xiaoqing to slander him. But the unusual thing was that Fei Du remembered everything that had happened before and after clearly, including Fei Chengyu's tone of voice. Why would he only have forgotten this segment?

But Fei Du's condition was obviously unsuited for further questioning. Luo Wenzhou could only temporarily lay down his arms, checking his temperature, suspecting it was him going too far fooling around earlier that had made Fei Du catch a chill. Though the current temperature display showed that the temperature in the room was nearly 27°; you wouldn't feel cool wearing short sleeves. Luo Wenzhou couldn't come up with an answer after thinking it over and in the end had to sum it up in one cause—Fei Du, perhaps belonging to the category of tropical fish, was weak.

But when his body was tired after excessive activity, Fei Du's mind was never willing to behave and rest inside his motionless outer form. It wandered around at random while he slept.

First he dreamed that he'd taken out a can of cat food but had forgotten to open it for Luo Yiguo. Then he dreamed that Luo Wenzhou was displeased for some reason, not paying attention to him no matter how he coaxed. Finally, he seemed to return to the day Tao Ran had been brought to the hospital—the strange thing was that in the real world, when Fei Du and Luo Wenzhou had arrived, Tao Ran had already been in the emergency room, and they'd only gotten a quick look at him when his condition had stabilized and he'd been taken to an ordinary hospital room.

But in his disordered dream, Fei Du thought he saw Tao Ran covered all over in blood, bones with torn flesh on them bursting from his body. Tao Ran's face was flushed purple, and his eyes were protruding. It was a horrifying appearance of death.

Fei Du instantly opened his eyes, waking with a start.

His eyelids felt heavy, but in the instant it took for him to open his eyes, his wild thoughts were instantly forced back into place through thorough training. Frowning, Fei Du remembered the dream he'd just had, feeling it was a little wrong, because Tao Ran had been injured in a car crash. So why had his dream given him the appearance of being suffocated?

It didn't seem very logical.

But probably even Stephen Hawking couldn't have asked for all his dreams to be logical. The doubt flashed through Fei Du's mind, and then he felt somewhat unwell, something like the ache of being in the same position for too long. Fei Du gently pulled away Luo Wenzhou's arms, which were clinging a little tightly. He turned over, but the usually soft and comfortable mattress seemed to have turned into a cement floor. However he turned over, he felt that it was pressing against his bones. Covered only in a light-weight quilt, he felt it was pressing down on him so he couldn't quite catch his breath. No matter what, he couldn't find a comfortable position.

When Fei Du was very carefully turning over for the third time, Luo Wenzhou, who normally couldn't be shaken even by thunder, suddenly turned on the bedside lamp. "What's wrong?"

Fei Du didn't feel like talking. He buried most of his face against the pillow, avoiding the lamplight, shaking his head.

Luo Wenzhou reached out a hand to feel, then sat up with a start. "You're burning up like a radiator, and you're still shaking your head!"

Fei Du half opened his eyes somewhat vaguely, seeing Luo Wenzhou rush out to find fever-reducing medicine.

When Luo Wenzhou had lived alone, he'd mostly used things like safflower oil and Yunnan white medicinal powder6. He had a hoard of band-aids and iodine, but the rest was basically all expired medication. He rifled boxes and turned over drawers, working up a sweat. Next to him, Luo Yiguo was unwilling to be tranquil, dragging over an unopened can from somewhere, clawing and biting at it on the floor, the can making banging noises as it fell.

Luo Wenzhou shushed it, quietly reprimanding, "If you keep making a fuss, I'll lock you out on the balcony!"

Luo Yiguo pushed the can with its feet, raising its head and glaring indomitably at him, evidently meaning to fight him to the end.

Luo Wenzhou wasn't in the mood to pay attention to it. He finally found a box of fever-reducing medicine, scanned the directions and manufacturing date, discovered that it actually hadn't expired, and quickly took it to Fei Du.

As he gave Fei Du the medicine from his hand, he couldn't resist wanting to sigh. "President Fei, let's talk it over. Can we exercise a little starting tomorrow, set up a routine?"

Fei Du didn't have the energy to joke with him. He only vaguely said, "Tomorrow's fine."

He forced himself to drink half a glass of water, unsteadily pushed the glass away, and patted the back of Luo Wenzhou's hand twice in thanks, then curled up and didn't move. Fei Du was usually adept at making trouble, but after belatedly realizing that he was sick, he behaved himself, seeming to take orderly stock of his limited forces and intelligently lower all his life functions as much as possible, allocating all his strength to his immune system.

Luo Wenzhou watched him very uneasily for a while and found that this patient could entirely take care of himself; he didn't have the bad habit of throwing off covers and tossing around. Suddenly he rather tenderly touched his hair. "Who took care of you before when you got sick?"

Fei Du wanted to say, "Minor illnesses were nothing to worry about, for big ones I went to the hospital," but in reality his lips moved and he said nothing. The soporific effect of the fever-reducing medication bore down. The sound of Luo Wenzhou walking around seemed to come through a layer of something, further and further. Soon it had turned into a haze. Fei Du, holding on to the unsaid answer, was forced into sleep by the medicine. The unsettled question escaped his consciousness and seeped into his dreams.

In his dream, he saw his bedroom when he was little—the whole villa was decorated according to Fei Chengyu's preferences, including the woman and the child's rooms. The richly-colored pieces of furniture had their own atmosphere, pressing down on the youthful inhabitant's personality until not a sliver remained. Everything was cold...only fortunately the window faced south, and the light was good.

Fei Du vaguely remembered one time he'd leaned at the head of the bed, the sun falling on his body, restricted to bed because of a sudden cold and fever.

While Fei Chengyu wasn't home, he'd secretly taken out a strip of paper from his pencil case.

There were three strings of digits on the strip. Secretly entering a forbidden place was the sort of thing you had to do a second time. Fei Du had spent nearly half a year quietly watching Fei Chengyu's every move, secretly collecting all the other codes Fei Chengyu used in his daily life, making a simple summary and count of the encoding rules, producing a few principles from this analysis, trying to determine the code to the basement.

He had no chance to make a wrong attempt, because entering the wrong code would raise the alarm. No matter where Fei Chengyu was, he would receive a notification at once. Fei Du had finally fixed on three possible combinations Fei Chengyu may have used, but he really couldn't determine which one of the three it was.

Just then, someone knocked on the door. Fei Du had just stuck the "treasonous and heretical" slip of paper back into the pencil case in a flurry when his mom came in carrying cold medicine mixed with water.

She gently changed the soaked and scalding towel on his forehead, then used a towel soaked in cool water to wipe him down. Throughout the process, she was like a robot, doing everything attentively and methodically, but unwilling to make any eye contact with him, as though any extraneous contact would bring calamity down upon them.

Fei Du wanted to call out "mom," but when the word came to his throat, it stuck. He only opened his mouth.

When the woman had finished cleaning him, she seemed less gloomy than before. There was even a bit of briskness in her step. Little Fei Du wanted to say something to her, but he didn't know where to start. Seeing she was about to leave, he hastily reached out an arm to catch her. The unzipped pencil case on his knee fell, and the strip of paper with the codes written on it slipped out.

The air seemed to solidify.

After a good while, the woman bent down and picked up the pencil case and the little slip of paper. Fei Du subconsciously held his breath. The woman at last looked up and met his eyes. Her gaze was so complicated and hard to read that the boy couldn't tell what she meant. He nervously clutched the quilt.

Would she tell Fei Chengyu? Would she suddenly go mad?

As his apprehension increased, the woman, as if she hadn't understood, put the slip of paper back into the pencil case and gently put it back in his lap, kissed the top of his head, then turned and left.

After he'd heard the door, Fei Du hesitantly pulled out the strip of paper he'd written the codes on. He saw that there was a fingernail mark under one of the codes.

Three days later, when he learned that Fei Chengyu had gone out of town, he used that code to open the basement's thick door. The basement was like a forbidden area. The stairs were narrow and winding; you couldn't see the end from the top. Dim lights flickered in the gloomy wall lamps, lighting up the malevolent dragons on the wallpaper. There seemed to be a monster hidden inside, darkly opening its mouth wide.

In the dream, Fei Du thought that as he walked down step by step, his mom was watching from the second floor. When he opened the door, there seemed to be a faint black mist screening the desk and the cupboards on all four sides. He hesitantly approached the desk and saw a stack of printed treatises.

Then the dream turned into chaos. The characters printed on the paper suddenly grew, spreading on the paper like bloodstains. The space around him heaved as though it was about to crumble. The floor and ceiling shattered. There were the mixed sounds of shattering glass, the terrible footsteps, and a woman's screams. The feeling of suffocation suddenly attacked, making him unable to catch a breath. At the same time, he seemed to hear a man saying by his ear, "My Picture Album Project can also launch..."

Fei Du was covered in cold sweat. He suddenly sat up. Then, feeling the world spinning around him, he fell back and was embraced by Luo Wenzhou.

"Don't throw off the covers yet." Luo Wenzhou pulled him back and wiped the sweat at the corners of his forehead. He was very gratified to feel that his temperature had fallen and softly kissed his temple. "Did you have a nightmare? It's easy to have nightmares when you've taken fever-reducing medicine. I've been waiting here all night for you to throw yourself into my arms. Come here and let me comfort you."

The fierce ringing in Fei Du's ears subsided. He hesitated, then said, "It wasn't really a nightmare. It was only a very fantastic plot."

"...A fantastic plot?" Luo Wenzhou said. "Like riding a train into the sky?"

Clowning around with a sick person first thing in the morning really was low. Speechless, Fei Du poked him with his elbow.

"Like how when I worked out Fei Chengyu's code on my first try, it was actually because my mom gave me a hint," Fei Du said. "Also...I think Fei Chengyu said something to me about 'my Picture Album Project...'"

Luo Wenzhou paused. "You don't remember how you opened that door?"

"I do, I remember I worked out a few possibilities, then went to try, and very luckily the first code I tried worked..." Fei Du's words suddenly paused. He'd noticed something off. Looking at his childhood mental state from an outsider's point of view, he thought that no matter what he wouldn't have run the risk of making Fei Chengyu angry by hastily going to try out some codes he was entirely unsure of.

So had his mom really given him a hint?

Why didn't he remember anything about it?

Luo Wenzhou covered his eyes. "Go back to sleep. We can talk about sad things when you're better."

When he'd gotten Fei Du settled down, Luo Wenzhou quietly got up, heated up breakfast, and put it in a heat-preserving container. Then he left a note and went alone to the records room. Asking for a transfer of files required going through formal procedures, especially sealed records, but this was a very particular time; if he'd gone through the formalities, he still wouldn't have found anyone who could sign for him. The person in charge of the records room had smoked countless packs of his cigarettes, so he turned a blind eye and let him in.

Luo Wenzhou searched around; as expected, he couldn't find anything of value. There was only a thin book on the Picture Album Project with some very surface-level introductory words in it. There were also a few superficial treatises that all looked like they'd been copied and pasted from all over. The head of the Picture Album Project had been Yan Security Uni's professor Fan Siyuan, but among the papers included in the end, his signature didn't appear on any of them as either author or academic advisor.

The contents of Fan Siyuan's personal file were also pitifully scant. Only his work experience and publication history were collected; they came to an abrupt halt thirteen years ago, but his recorded death, very strangely, was ten years ago.—Lao Yang had vaguely mentioned him, saying that he'd died. He'd always thought that it was something like killing himself to avoid punishment after the Picture Album Project had been exposed or a mishap while being apprehended. He hadn't expected to find it was nothing like that.

It was first thing in the morning. The person in charge called to Luo Wenzhou and went to the bathroom. Luo Wenzhou took the opportunity to quickly copy all the collected files that had been used in the first Picture Album Project, proficiently taking a turn as a thief.

Before leaving, his gaze fell momentarily on Fan Siyuan's work record, and a divine light suddenly flashed through his mind—

Yes, Director Lu had said that after starting work, Gu Zhao had gone to Yan Security Uni to do a postgraduate program!

Meanwhile, Xiao Haiyang had gone to the rehab center first thing in the morning. A rehab center wasn't like a public park where you could just show up. He sat waiting uneasily for an age before finally seeing Ma Xiaowei. Xiao Haiyang secretly sighed in relief—so many things had gone wrong lately, he'd been afraid that when he'd just found a bit of a lead he would be informed that Ma Xiaowei had also been silenced.

Ma Xiaowei had gained some weight and no longer had the look of a drug addict, but his mental state was rather listless. The listlessness vanished as soon as he saw Xiao Haiyang. He tensed all over.

CHAPTER 147 - Edmond Dantès XVIII

Xiao Haiyang wanted to smile at him to ease the tense atmosphere, but when the corners of his mouth pulled up, it looked like an unsuccessful forced smile; the effect was unusual. Anyway, when Ma Xiaowei saw it, his face turned even greener.

Xiao Haiyang: "..."

He had to abandon the amiable route. In a businesslike manner, he flashed a frosty look like a shop sign. "Do you remember me?"

Ma Xiaowei nodded cautiously. "Hello, Officer Xiao."

"I've been transferred to the City Bureau," Xiao Haiyang said. "I came here today to ask you about a few things."

Ma Xiaowei laced his hands together. Sitting uneasily, he lowered his head, looking as though he'd been dragged in for interrogation again.

Xiao Haiyang watched him closely for a moment. "You've worked with us. We saved your life and helped clear you of suspicion of murder. I'm not saying you should be delighted to see me, but at least you shouldn't be so nervous.—Ma Xiaowei, you actually know what I want to ask, right?"

The veins on the backs of Ma Xiaowei's hands tensed.

Xiao Haiyang said, "On the night of May twentieth of this year, you took He Zhongyi's cell phone and sold it to drug dealers. Then He Zhongyi was murdered, and his body was dumped at the sight of the drug transaction. The next morning, a passerby discovered He Zhongyi's corpse. And while the police were making visits and investigating this case all over, you had a dispute with the local residents and were taken with them to the Flower Market District Sub-Bureau. You made a slip of the tongue that let us know that you were on the scene around when the murder was committed, and that something else had happened, which you couldn't talk about at the sub-bureau."

Ma Xiaowei said falteringly, "Yes...I told you all of that before."

"I know." Xiao Haiyang's gaze watched intently from behind lenses like the bottoms of bottles. "What I want to ask you is whether you made a slip of the tongue yourself, or did someone instruct you on what to say?"

Ma Xiaowei trembled.

"You're timid, cowardly, and a liar," Xiao Haiyang said, hitting the nail on the head. Seeing Ma Xiaowei open his mouth as though planning to defend himself, Xiao Haiyang interrupted him. "You don't need to deny it. Stealing and lying are typical characteristics of drug users.—Didn't you confess yourself at the time that you'd stolen He Zhongyi's phone and then lied to him?

"So here's what I don't understand." Xiao Haiyang leaned back lightly. "You aren't some kind of honest person who doesn't know how to lie. Why did you slip up when the police casually asked you a few questions? Is it very hard to say 'I don't know' to everything? You clearly knew that Wang Hongliang's people had been there that night. Deliberately being ambiguous like that, weren't you afraid they'd silence you?"

Ma Xiaowei had nothing to say.

"Did the person who instructed you give you a guarantee that Wang Hongliang and the rest would soon reap the consequences of their evil, so you didn't need to worry?"

Ma Xiaowei's eyes widened slightly. He was after all an underage child. His momentary astonished expression immediately gave him away.

When Xiao Haiyang had gotten home last night, he'd considered all night how he should ask. The hard-working are rewarded; seeing Ma Xiaowei's expression, he methodically said the weightiest words: "I'll tell you something. You remember when I took you to the City Bureau? In fact, that night, Wang Hongliang's people had sent a message to their co-conspirator on duty at the sub-bureau, telling him to get rid you, the eyewitness, as soon as possible. If I hadn't been keeping an eye on them and snatched you away before they could act, you'd be a pile of ashes by now."

All the blood drained out of Ma Xiaowei's face. "That, that can't..."

"In fact, you weren't useful anymore then." Xiao Haiyang pressed on step by step. "The police had already found definite leads and would soon find video evidence of Wang Hongliang's crimes. You dying in the sub-bureau wouldn't make any impact. At most it would be another criminal charge for Wang Hongliang. They didn't care about you at all. They just left you to run your course."

It was as if Ma Xiaowei had been struck by lightning. Xiao Haiyang quickly followed up, "So who instructed you?"

Ma Xiaowei's lips trembled. A good while later, he forced out a few words. "It...it was Zhao...Zhao-ge."

"Which Zhao-ge?" First Xiao Haiyang stared; then he quickly recalled. "You mean the Zhao-ge who lived in the same apartment as you and said he came from the same province as He Zhongyi? Called Zhao Yulong?"

Ma Xiaowei bit his lip and nodded.

Xiao Haiyang frowned.—He remembered how Wang Hongliang had been ready to let Ma Xiaowei carry the can, acting the part of the criminal suspect, hastily giving the City Bureau a solution to the extremely strange case of He Zhongyi. But he'd known there was something fishy about this, so he'd gone with Tao Ran, who'd also had doubts, to privately visit a few of He Zhongyi's acquaintances, Zhao Yulong among them.

He hadn't been a crucial figure at all, because at the time of the crime, he was supposed to have gone to his hometown to attend a funeral. He'd only learned of He Zhongyi's death when Xiao Haiyang had called him, then hastily returned to Yan City. Actually, he hadn't even counted as a witness; you could only say it had been an ordinary visit to understand something of the victim's background.

Apart from him and Tao Ran, it was possible the others didn't know such a person existed.

But thinking about it carefully, the clues this Passerby A-like Zhao Yulong had supplied had been rather key—the origin of He Zhongyi's white cell phone and He Zhongyi's altercation with Zhang Donglai had both come into the police force's line of sight only after talking to him. Most importantly, He Zhongyi had dressed rather formally to go to the Chengguang Mansion to meet Zhao Haochang, and the shoes he'd been wearing had been borrowed from Zhao Yulong, so it was likely that he had grasped what He Zhongyi was doing.

Actually, the first person whose investigation had reached the Chengguang Mansion at the time had been Fei Du, because he'd chanced to encounter He Zhongyi asking the way. But thinking about it, given Zhao Yulong's statement, even without Fei Du's chance encounter the police would very naturally have turned their line of sight towards the Chengguang Mansion, then realized that the "scene of the crime" Ma Xiaowei had been unwilling to talk about in his babbling hadn't in fact been the "scene of the crime," and other secrets were involved.

In an instant, countless thoughts flashed through Xiao Haiyang's mind. He pursed his dry lips slightly. "Didn't you say that this Zhao Yulong had gone to his hometown to attend a funeral on the night of the crime?"

"He said he was going back to his hometown, but the next morning, before it got light, he suddenly came back. Zhongyi hadn't come back, the others weren't there, so I was alone in the apartment," Ma Xiaowei said in a sobbing tone. "He suddenly shook me awake and showed me the photos online that you guys hadn't had time to delete yet, asked me what was going on... As soon as I opened my eyes I saw...saw Zhongyi-ge... I...I..."

As soon as he remembered this, Ma Xiaowei couldn't quite get his words out. He talked babbled for a while, then simply covered his face and began to cry dully.

Xiao Haiyang: "..."

He sat stiffly for a while, maintaining the indifference of an objective onlooker. Then, thinking of something, he suddenly furtively reached out and cautiously patted Ma Xiaowei's shoulder with his fingertips. After a light touch, he drew back again, as though Ma Xiaowei were a human hedgehog and would prick his hand.

"Zhao-ge asked me what was going on, and he said that Zhongyi-ge was downstairs and there were police all over outside. I didn't dare to believe it, pulled open the window and looked out, then I knew that it was true. My mind buzzed, and then I heard Zhao-ge next to me saying, 'It looks like they found Zhongyi in that triangular piece of land.' When I heard that, I was scared to death—that was the place I'd bought the stuff the night before, why would Zhongyi-ge have anything to do with them? He never touched that stuff, I knew that... My first reaction was, Oh no, this definitely happened because I sold that phone."

"You thought that He Zhongyi had seen you sell his precious new phone and had gone up to argue with the drug dealers, trying to take his phone back, and so had gotten killed by them?" Xiao Haiyang asked. "Did you think so yourself, or did someone mislead you?"

Ma Xiaowei looked at him blankly.

"All right," Xiao Haiyang said helplessly. This silly child had no idea he'd been used. "And then what?"

"Zhongyi-ge was nice to me, if I wasn't so... I wouldn't have stolen his stuff! I was scared, so I told Zhao-ge everything and asked him what to do, but Zhao-ge said, 'If Wang Hongliang and the others killed him, then Zhongyi-ge died for nothing.'"

Xiao Haiyang noticed something and said grimly, "You mean that Zhao Yulong also knew about Wang Hongliang and the others.—Did he take drugs?"

Ma Xiaowei shook his head. "He wasn't like us. But Zhao-ge had been there a long time, longer than anyone else. He knew everything."

Xiao Haiyang frowned again—because when they'd spoken to Zhao Yulong, they hadn't noticed that he was the sort of great person of vast resources who "knew everything." Not only that, he'd pretended he'd just come from out of town and knew nothing about the cause of He Zhongyi's death!

Xiao Haiyang's spine suddenly felt cold. "What did he make you do?"

"Zhao-ge snuck a look outside and said there was a police car he hadn't seen before and some grunts looking around, and he said he'd seen the head of the police bureau bowing and scraping to someone," Ma Xiaowei said quietly. "Zhao-ge said this thing had definitely made a big noise and someone had come from above to investigate, and maybe we had a chance to get justice for Zhongyi-ge."

"You're saying Zhao-ge could even tell which police car didn't come from the sub-bureau?" Xiao Haiyang asked in disbelief. "And he recognized Wang Hongliang?"

Ma Xiaowei nodded matter-of-factly. "Zhao-ge knew lots of people. He could find out all about anything."

Xiao Haiyang had nothing to say to this. These little boys who came into chaotic contact with the teeming world before they'd grown up had a cult-like superstitious faith in "connections." For them, there was nothing that couldn't be explained with "having people above," and if it couldn't, then all it took was adding "having brothers on the inside."

"Zhao-ge said that reasonably speaking the police would come to the place Zhongyi-ge lived to ask questions, but since the people who'd killed him were the same as the ones investigating, their questioning would only be walking past so their bosses would see. If we wanted to redress the injustice, we had to make the people above hear it, had to go to the sub-bureau and make a stink. But the sub-bureau was their territory, it would be the same as informing on them right in front of their faces. Zhao-ge asked whether I dared. If I did, then I'd do what he instructed. He guaranteed it would be all right, at most I'd be locked up for a couple days and then let go, there would definitely be someone above protecting me. And if I didn't dare, that was all right, after all, Zhongyi-ge wasn't a relative or a friend, and I hadn't hurt him on purpose.

"Zhao-ge said a lot of other heartfelt things to me, said he'd seen lots of young people like me, and all of them ended up rotting in the dirt, getting rolled up in a mat and taken out of the city to be burnt. For the luckier ones, their families were notified. Some were handled like vagrants, their parents and relatives didn't know anything. He said that if I did what he said, if I could make it count as meritorious service, all the petty pilfering and 'doing snow' could be written off. I wouldn't be arrested, and I could go to rehab for free and be like a normal person when I got out. No one would know I'd gone the wrong way."

Ma Xiaowei wiped his tears, looking aggrieved. Xiao Haiyang developed some unpracticed compassion, for once biting back the true and unfeeling words, "He just wanted to trick you into being cannon fodder."

Xiao Haiyang spent over an hour going back and forth with Ma Xiaowei before he felt he understood things, then said goodbye and left. Upon leaving, he suddenly remembered something. Pushing at his glasses, Xiao Haiyang asked, "Though Zhao Yulong told you a pack of lies, he didn't instruct you to break the law in any way. Why did you seem kind of afraid when I first came in?"

Ma Xiaowei looked up, white-faced—

"Ma Xiaowei said that on the way from the City Bureau to the rehab center, a car was following him, then showed him a message that said he'd done well. The person in the car was wearing dark glasses, and it definitely wasn't Zhao-ge. This scared him. Ma Xiaowei thought the words were ironic, sort of like, 'Well, haven't you done a fine job.' He thought someone had found out about what he and Zhao Yulong had talked over privately, and that someone from Wang Hongliang's party had slipped through the net and was threatening him." Xiao Haiyang was sitting upright on Luo Wenzhou's couch, formally reporting.

The couch in Luo Wenzhou's house was very soft. You sank in as soon as you sat down. But Xiao Haiyang was unwilling to go with the flow; it seemed as though he had three hundred more vertebrae than other people, sitting on the couch as though it were a cold bench, making a stark contrast with Fei Du next to him.

Fei Du had his hand propped on the arm of the couch and his head down, sprawling bonelessly, with Luo Yiguo next to him doing the same, leaning on his leg with its neck askew, sleeping like a cat cake, having rubbed fur all over President Fei's fashionable pants.

Fei Du, Xiao Haiyang, Lang Qiao, and Luo Wenzhou were sitting around a little coffee table, temporarily using Luo Wenzhou's living room as their stronghold. The phone on the table was connected to Tao Ran, who was still in the hospital.

"I remember Zhao Yulong," Tao Ran said over the phone. "Never mind Xiao Xiao, even I didn't notice there was anything wrong with him. If it's true, then that's too frightful... Hello? Is the signal bad? Why is there so much static?"

Luo Wenzhou stood up and wordlessly picked up Luo Yiguo, snoring as it leaned against Fei Du, and put it into the cat bed.

"I investigated the identity information the two of us recorded at the time," Xiao Haiyang continued. "A person called Zhao Yulong does exist, and he did come to Yan City, but he went back to his hometown five years ago. His Mandarin is very bad. He's completely different from the person we met. And apparently he lost an ID once."

"The people who live in the little houses there are all poor young workers, newcomers, empty-handed. Though this Zhao Yulong wouldn't stand out in a crowd, looked at on his own, he was actually pretty different from those youngsters. How to put it... He had a sort of tidy dignity," Tao Ran said over the phone. "This is my fault. I didn't inquire deeply at the time because he may have been having a hard time at home."

"So what was this fake Zhao Yulong doing here?" Lang Qiao asked. "Secretly gathering evidence of Wang Hongliang and the others taking part in drug trafficking, volunteering to rid the people of an evil?"

Fei Du said, "From what Ma Xiaowei says, it sounds like this person had already been lying low a long time. If he'd really wanted to rid the people of an evil, then he'd have done something other than..."

"Just being an unused chess piece, watching others' mortal peril and doing nothing," Luo Wenzhou picked up, glaring at Fei Du. "Don't talk when your throat aches, it hurts me to listen to you."

Lang Qiao: "..."

She felt she'd asked a very wrong question and that there was nowhere for her gaze to rest. She could only turn towards Xiao Haiyang, who was as extraneous as she was. "So who was this fake Zhao Yulong?"

CHAPTER 148 - Edmond Dantès XIX

Xiao Haiyang hesitated. "I don't know yet."

"But I have some idea," Luo Wenzhou suddenly put in. "That's another reason I called you in.

"While investigating Wang Hongliang, I went to the Great Fortune Building to try to save Chen Zhen and met a fake front desk receptionist. Then, in the Yufen Middle School case, after Feng Bin was killed at the Drum Tower, Fei Du and I were investigating along the path those kids had taken..."

"Oh?" Lang Qiao acutely seized the key piece of information. "The two of you went to the Lovers'...went, uh, there to—to investigate the case?"

When she'd said this, there was silence all around.—Xiao Haiyang had no idea what she was talking about. Fei Du, head propped on his hand, was looking at her with a not-quite-smile like a demon looking for a chance to suck out a person's soul, frightening Lang Qiao so she didn't dare to meet his gaze and silently averted her line of sight.

Luo Wenzhou, however, was more "benevolent." He only took out an ancient file and whacked Lang Big Eyes on the forehead in a very practiced motion. "Aren't you clever!"

Lang Qiao said, "...Imperial Father, I'm a fool."

Luo Wenzhou rolled his eyes at her and flattened out the old folder, which was about to fall apart. "In the spot where Feng Bin met the killer, we ran into a fake patrolman going under someone else's name. While we were pursuing Lu Guosheng, the security tapes at Beiyuan's Longyun Center were swapped, and the security guard 'Wang Jian' disappeared afterwards—a fake security guard. Later, when we investigated Wang Xiao again, we looked through Yufen Middle School's security camera records from November sixth and found that the female schoolfellows mentioned in Wang Xiao's testimony hadn't returned to school, and the person who'd followed her into the bathroom had actually been a janitor.

"A fake janitor." Luo Wenzhou paused. "Add in another fake Zhao Yulong, and it sounds like a pattern, doesn't it?"

"They're all minor figures, their surface identities either solitary out-of-towners or temporary workers in jobs with a high turnover where it's easy to disguise yourself." Xiao Haiyang came around at once and picked up. "And they all seem to have prototypes. For example, there really is a Zhao Yulong. The place of birth, name, age, even part of the work history matches. This way, even if someone investigates, as long as they don't investigate in depth, it would still be hard to find a gap!"

"You've left one out," Fei Du said very lightly. "We also haven't found the fake delivery person Dong Qian had direct contact with before he killed Zhou Junmao. Without considering the motive, I think it's appropriate to classify that case in the same category."

"A service worker, a patrolman, a security guard, a janitor, a delivery person..." Lang Qiao shuddered, finding that she couldn't think too much about this; thinking too much, it would be easy to get paranoid—service workers could easily drug food and drinks, patrolmen and security guards were nearly symbols of safety, janitors were like invisible people in any setting, not raising suspicions anywhere they went, and delivery people could knock on the doors of countless unsuspecting homes.

But the trouble was, these service professions, while being endowed with exceptional faith, were sometimes also the ones with the highest turnover, the most changes in personnel, the least rigorous entrance and exit examinations.

"Taking on a fake identity, being able to stay concealed over a long period of time—it's likely this is all the same gang." Luo Wenzhou pulled out a photograph from the file. "Luckily, we've found the end of one thread.

"This woman is called Zhu Feng. She's the fake janitor who snuck into Wang Xiao's school. We were able to determine her identity because she has a criminal record. Fourteen years ago, Zhu Feng's newlywed husband was killed. The killer was later judged to be mentally challenged and incompetent, so he was spared from criminal punishment. Zhu Feng didn't accept this and snuck into the mental hospital and attempted to get revenge. She failed. Later this case was part of the first Picture Album Project." Luo Wenzhou paused, pulling seven thin case files out of the folder and handing them around. "You may not know that there was a mishap during the first Picture Album Project."

"What mishap?" Lang Qiao said.

"The first Picture Album Project collected unresolved cases where the suspects couldn't be apprehended for all sorts of reasons. Those are the ones you're holding. All old cases, some because of technological limits, some because time had passed and the evidence was insufficient...all kinds of reasons that the suspect hadn't paid the price—adding in this case of the mentally disabled suspect spared criminal penalty, there were seven cases altogether. I only got these materials by deception. It was against discipline and has to be kept strictly secret. The materials don't leave this room.—And after being collected in the Picture Album Project, the chief suspects in each case who hadn't been arrested due to insufficient evidence died unusual deaths one after another."

"The causes of death were very delicate." Fei Du scanned the old case files. "For example, in the case of the mentally disabled killer who was shut up in a mental hospital, his death was very similar to that of the victim he'd killed before being placed in the hospital. They were both stabbed in the chest and abdomen by the same style of knife, and the distribution of wounds was almost identical. On the day this mental patient was killed, the power was suddenly cut in the hospital he was staying at, and a portion of the security cameras stopped working. Someone knocked out the nurse on duty and pried open the lock on the door.—And in the end the weapon he was stabbed with was found in the next room along with bloody clothes. The fingerprints of the patient in the next room were also found on the weapon...but this patient was very seriously ill. He could hardly communicate. They couldn't get anything out of him. Even if he'd really killed this person, there was nothing to be done about it."

"A mental patient kills someone and then gets killed by another mental patient?" Tao Ran said over the phone. "What do you call that? Karmic retribution?"

"Once is karmic retribution. If it happens this many times in a row, then the 'retribution' isn't purely natural." Fei Du smiled. Then he thought of something, and his smile immediately vanished. His gaze was grave.—Using some means to secretly gather the victims of vile crimes, arranging them like chess pieces, weaving a net with unremarkable minor individuals... If he hadn't been born about a decade too late, Fei Du nearly would have suspected he'd done this himself; he couldn't resist turning his head and coughing a few times.

"Didn't I tell you to talk less?" Luo Wenzhou frowned, pushing a cup of warm water in front of him. "If you interrupt again I'll tape your mouth shut."

"Is this why the previous Picture Album Project was called to a halt?" Lang Qiao asked. "So who killed these people?"

"The person in charge of the Picture Album Project then was a senior professor at Yan Security Uni, named Fan Siyuan. I looked into it, and Lao Yang, Director Lu, Gu Zhao—all of them studied at Yan Security Uni and were his students at one point. He later vanished without a trace, and his status was only changed to 'dead' two or three years later."

Hearing the name "Gu Zhao," Xiao Haiyang's brain had short-circuited. He asked directly, "What does that mean?"

"That means it's likely this Fan Siyuan first disappeared, and only 'died' a few years after disappearing." One word at a time, Luo Wenzhou said, "It's likely he only 'died' in the legal sense."

Xiao Haiyang instantly looked up.

"But why? What's his motive?" Lang Qiao said. "Boss, I'll use your catchphrase—on what basis?"

"We won't know the motive until we catch him, and the basis is up to you to find. What else did I call you here to do?" Luo Wenzhou spread his hands. This was one benefit to being a leader; you could be strict with others and lenient with yourself, reach out and openly ask others for basis, then order your subordinate grunts to go investigate when others asked you for basis. "I've given you the theory, comrades, it's up to you to verify it!"

Lang Qiao: "..."

"Go investigate each case one by one. Go excavate the victims' close relatives and any people with close relationships. Don't overlook any lead. If this series of 'fake people' really are all connected to the old cases, then the identity of the person behind them goes without saying.—Xiao Haiyang, what is it now?"

Xiao Haiyang's chest was undulating fiercely. He raised somewhat blank eyes. "Captain Luo, since this Fan Siyuan has obtained so many people's trust, is it possible...is it possible he was the person in the know fourteen years ago? When Uncle Gu suspected there was a mole in the City Bureau and couldn't determine who to suspect, would he have sought someone else's help? His teacher's, for example? Isn't it possible that the person who sold out Uncle Gu wasn't from the City Bureau at all?"

Luo Wenzhou froze. Before he could speak, his phone suddenly rang. He gestured at Xiao Haiyang and picked up. "Yes... Yes? What, today? Fine, got it, thank you."

With everyone looking at him, Luo Wenzhou put down the phone. "The investigation team has determined to stop the investigation into Director Lu for now."

Lang Qiao first stared blankly, then beamed with joy. "Director Lu has been cleared of suspicion!"

"No, it's only temporary," Luo Wenzhou said quickly. "The investigation is still ongoing, he can't leave the city for now.—Look, you guys go investigate. Fei Du, don't run around while you're sick, stay home and summarize the information. I'll go see Director Lu, ask him in detail about the Picture Album while I'm at it."

The investigator politely asked Lu Youliang to the door and sent for a car to take him home. "Director Lu, are you going to your post or your home? There's really quite a lot of work that needs to be managed at the City Bureau now."

Director Lu's footsteps paused. He suddenly said, "Can I see Lao Zhang?"

The investigator stared, then said very urbanely, "I'm afraid..."

"Of course I don't mean see him in private. You can send someone to be present," Lu Youliang said. "Lao Zhang and I worked together for many years. Emotionally and reasonably, I won't believe he's done anything wrong. Let me say a few words, maybe we can remember something that's been overlooked.—Why don't you ask your superiors for guidance?"

The investigator looked deeply at him, then picked up his phone and stepped to one side.

An hour later, Zhang Chunjiu and Lu Youliang were received in a simple visiting room. The two of them faced each other helplessly, both showing wry smiles, feeling that they had been cut off from the world for a long time.—Zhang Chunjiu seemed even thinner. The white hair at Lu Youliang's temples had doubled over the last few days. It was clear they'd both been quite roughly tormented.

"I haven't managed the charge you left me well. Less than a year, and all this has happened. I've even dragged you in," Lu Youliang said.

Zhang Chunjiu put up a hand towards him, somewhat impatiently interrupting his words. "Lao Lu, it wasn't me back then."

Lu Youliang hadn't expected that they would even skip the stage of polite remarks, going right into the main subject. He looked involuntarily at the investigator next to him. The investigator silently pressed a button on a mini-recorder.

"I know it wasn't you," Lu Youliang said, sighing. "We've been brothers so many years. We know each other thoroughly."

"I wasn't in the know about Gu Zhao privately investigating The Louvre. He must have chosen the person he trusted most." Zhang Chunjiu lowered his voice. "You know who the person he trusted most was!"

Lu Youliang stared. Then he came around. "You're saying..."

"Listen to me, while I've been cooperating with the investigation these last few days, they've gone through all the arrangements of my last few years of work. Among them, one person asked me why I requested for the Picture Album Project to start up a second time," Zhang Chunjiu said quickly. "I was stupefied at the time, I said, 'What Picture Album Project?' They showed me a report I'd submitted.—Lao Lu, I really did submit a report. You know I always wanted to perfect our internal electronic file management. Aside from the smart field work system, I also wanted to classify case files, and add theoretical research results to consult for later cases. I only mentioned those things in the report. I didn't give the project any code name, and I especially didn't say it was called the Picture Album Project!"

Lu Youliang instantly opened his eyes wide, subconsciously tightening the hand he was holding in his pocket.

"This project was only passed down after I left my post," Zhang Chunjiu said. "Lao Lu, who called it the Picture Album Project? Why did they call it that?"

Lu Youliang opened his mouth. After a good while, he said with difficulty, "If it wasn't you, then it must have been someone at...at Yan Security Uni."

"Is Fan Siyuan really dead?" Zhang Chunjiu said, one word at a time. "Who wanted to revive this specter? Who wanted to frame me—us? Who's been hiding in our ranks secretly passing information outward? Lao Lu, make those children under your command go investigate. Only arresting this person can clear my name!"

Lu Youliang was nearly distraught when he got into the car. He knew that while the driver was ostensibly seeing him home, in reality he was secretly watching him. Meanwhile, what Zhang Chunjiu had just said was going back and forth by his ear.—You know who the person he trusted most was!

Who had Gu Zhao trusted most?

When Gu Zhao had been doing graduate studies at Yan Security Uni, he really had been on very good terms with his advisor, Fan Siyuan. If he'd thought there was a mole at the City Bureau, that no one was safe, would he have chosen his advisor?

Or... Had that been the person he trusted most?

The City Bureau didn't assign compulsory partners, but in practice, there were people who were in the habit of working together, for example Luo Wenzhou and Tao Ran now—and Gu Zhao and Yang Zhengfeng then.

The first time Lu Guosheng's fingerprints had been discovered, Yang Zhengfeng had been away, but what about later? If Gu Zhao had suspected someone had been leaking information, then wouldn't Yang Zhengfeng, who'd been absent at the time, have been cleared of suspicion by being out of it? He and Gu Zhao had been captain and deputy-captain, had worked together the most, were most familiar with each other...

If Yang Zhengfeng hadn't given up his life three years earlier, then now, with Gu Zhao's case reopened, suspicion would definitely have been concentrated on him.

"Director Lu, we've arrived at your home."

Lu Youliang gave a start, pulled himself together, and forced a smile at the driver. He got out of the car and nearly tripped over the curb.—There was cold sweat covering his back. He quickly went upstairs and, from a secret compartment in his bookcase, pulled out a listening device that had run out of batteries.

Lu Youliang stared at the listening device for a long time, then put it in his pocket. While going out the door, he told his worried wife, "I'm going to the hospital."

Then, ignoring his wife's repeated questions, he left home in big strides.

At the Second Hospital, Tao Ran had finished attending the telephone meeting filled with explosive information. Before he'd had time to straighten out what he'd just heard, a visitor came to his hospital room—Xiao Wu, the criminal policeman who'd gone with him to investigate Yin Ping, came over carrying various bags of fruit and nourishment, piling the hospital room's windowsill full.

"What are you doing?" Tao Ran said quickly. "Bonuses haven't been distributed yet. Don't you want to live? Have you bought your parents stuff for the Spring Festival? Take that stuff back, use it to pay tribute to your elders."

Xiao Wu rubbed his hands together and sat down next to him. "Deputy-Captain Tao, let me pay tribute to you first, I was following right behind you that day, if I hadn't been too slow... I... I'm such a... I gave Kong Weichen's family some money, too—not a lot, I don't have much on hand, I just thought that I'd feel a little easier this way."

Tao Ran examined his expression, thinking his little shidi's face was very weary, the black circles around his eyes nearly hanging down to his chin. He sat uneasily, looking like he wanted to say something. "Xiao Wu, what's wrong?"

"Ge," Xiao Wu managed to say after stammering for a long time, "there's something I... I don't know how to say it... I really fucking..."

"What?" Tao Ran asked doubtfully.

Xiao Wu's eyes were red. He seemed about to start crying. He looked up at Tao Ran, wrapped up in bandages and casts, then bent over and buried his face in his palms. "When we went to arrest Yin Ping and they came to silence him before we'd finished coordinating, they're all saying now that it was Kong Weichen calling someone... I don't know the details, I heard from Lao Kong's family that people came a few times to investigate at his house, maybe even a 'martyr' would..."

Tao Ran looked at him, frowning.

"Actually...actually it wasn't him."

"Xiao Wu," Tao Ran said heavily, "what do you mean?"

Xiao Wu slowly took a small evidence bag from his pocket. Inside it was a listening device the size of a button. Tao Ran's pupils instantly contracted.

"I found it in my bag," Xiao Wu said hoarsely. "The day before yesterday my sister's children asked me for New Year's money, so I went through my bag. It's out of battery, I still don't know... I don't...don't know who to talk to about this, I really don't know, ge, it's all my fault...it's all my fault!"

Tao Ran's gaze fell on the miniature listening device—it was exactly the same as the one Luo Wenzhou had found in his bag. Something flashed vaguely through his mind. "Enough, what's the use of crying? Where have you been recently? Who have you met?"

Xiao Wu looked at him blankly. "I...haven't gone anywhere, I was working overtime, I only went back and forth between work and home..."

No, it couldn't have been put there at the City Bureau. After they'd found the listening device on Tao Ran, they'd overtly and secretly screened their internal personnel countless times.—Thoughts spun quickly through Tao Ran's mind. And why hadn't there been a listening device on Luo Wenzhou? Luo Wenzhou's scope of authority was much greater, and his information was much more complete. Could the person eavesdropping on them really have thought Luo Wenzhou was more perceptive than any of them and would be hard to bug?

"Aside from work, where else did you go?" Tao Ran lifted his half-immobilized body, nearly getting out of his hospital bed. "Xiao Wu, think carefully."

"I really didn't... In the days before we investigated Yin Ping, I really..." Xiao Wu's brow furrowed tightly. "Apart from going to the kindergarten to pick up my nephew once, and going once to the hospital to see shiniang...I haven't even had time to pay attention to my girlfriend, I... Deputy-Captain Tao!"

Tao Ran had suddenly grabbed him.

CHAPTER 149 - Edmond Dantès XX

Tao Ran's left arm and right leg hung in a diagonal line. He looked like a salted fish laid out to dry in the sun outside a fisherman's house. When the salted fish suddenly performed such a difficult gesture, the IV in his arm flew right up into the air.

Xiao Wu jumped up in fright. "Ge, what are you doing? Lie—lie down... Lie down quickly, I'll call..."

The edges of Tao Ran's forehead were soaked in cold sweat. His misaligned bones collectively voiced their protests. His soaring heart rate made him gasp for breath, but he had no attention to spare to cry out in pain. Tao Ran gripped Xiao Wu's sleeve firmly with his swollen hand. "When did you...when did you go see shiniang?"

"Shiniang?" Xiao Wu was all at sea, not understanding why he would ask this. "Well, shiniang...shiniang has cancer, doesn't she? So I had to go. When she came here to the Second Hospital for her surgery, I was the one who drove her. I'd wanted to stay to help take care of her after the surgery, but then this happened—what's the matter?"

Tao Ran didn't answer. His heart was like the Arctic Ocean in a storm—perilous, full of snow and ice.

When they had been eating hotpot at Luo Wenzhou's house and had found the listening device in his bag, they'd discussed how it was very possible it hadn't been put there by someone on their team; everyone Tao Ran had seen going out on his own, witnesses, informers...even victims' families, could have placed it.

When he'd lain down that night, he'd tossed and turned, unable to sleep, inwardly reviewing all the people he'd seen alone. There really had been a moment where their shiniang Fu Jiahui had flashed through his mind—shiniang had called him to the Yang house and handed Lao Yang's testament over to him. And Lao Yang's testament had just happened to mention the then very mysterious-seeming Gu Zhao and the National Road 327 case.

Hardly any time had passed after they'd gotten hold of that top secret testament, with Lao Yang's shocking statement that some people had changed, when before they could digest it, the main character of the National Road 327 case had entered the arena, killing Feng Bin at the Drum Tower.

Had it been a coincidence?

A murderer wasn't a jukebox; how could it be a coincidence?

But it had been shiniang.

While they'd been discussing listening devices, moles, traitors, and other filthy subjects, thinking of her for an instant would have seemed to be profaning her.

Who would dare to suspect her in the least?

And why had she wanted to hand over Lao Yang's...unverified testament to him?

Tao Ran clearly remembered the day he'd gotten shiniang's phone call. He'd quickly picked up a box of cured meat and gone to answer her invitation. Lao Yang's home was in one of those old-fashioned six-story buildings. There was no elevator. The cured meat had been homemade by his relatives back home, and the box was insecurely wrapped, nearly falling apart as soon as you picked it up. He'd had to strain to prop up the bottom of the cardboard box in order to heave the thirty jin plus of stuff up to the sixth floor. His hand had trembled when he'd knocked on the door.

Then, with the distinctive smell of cured meat on his hands, he'd received the grievous news and the truth like a thunderclap.

When Fu Jiahui had seen him out the door and given him the testament, her expression had been very complicated. It had seemed pained, but there had also seemed to be a strange light flashing in her eyes.

Tao Ran remembered her saying, "These things need to be settled."

But he hadn't recovered from the hit yet. When he'd taken the testament, his hands had still been shaking uselessly. He hadn't been able to understand the heavy meaning behind her words.

Lao Yang had said, "There are some people there who have changed."

So...had you changed, too?

"I have to go out," Tao Ran suddenly said directly. "I have to go out and see someone, right now. I must go. Xiao Wu, help me!"

Xiao Wu looked at Deputy-Captain Tao's dried fish appearance, then looked at his expression, and nearly blurted out, "Are you crazy?"

Luo Wenzhou, who'd wanted to pick up Director Lu, was a beat too slow. Learning that Director Lu had already gone home, he really didn't want to wait even a minute. He wanted to find out everything there was about Fan Siyuan at once. So he very annoyingly drove to Director Lu's address, not expecting to come up empty again—

"The hospital?" Luo Wenzhou looked helplessly back at the equally bewildered Mrs. Lu. "Auntie, did Uncle Lu say why he was going to the hospital?"

"No." Mrs. Lu shook her head. "From the moment he walked in the door, he seemed possessed. He charged right to the study without even taking off his jacket or changing his shoes, stayed less than two minutes, then suddenly ran out again. I don't know what he's up to."

Luo Wenzhou frowned, absently saying goodbye to Mrs. Lu.

Director Lu had just come back from the investigation team. Instead of staying with his alarmed wife or going to the City Bureau to take charge of the general situation, he'd gone to the hospital alone—where was the reasoning in that?

What did he know?

Luo Wenzhou walked slower and slower. He stopped with one hand propped on the roof of his car for a good while. Suddenly he thought of something, opened the car door, and got in, ramming the gas pedal and howling towards the Second Hospital.

Lu Youliang walked into the inpatient building empty-handed, at odds with the visitors carrying bags of all sizes. When he came to Fu Jiahui's door, he stared at the doorplate with a complicated expression for a long time, took a deep breath, then knocked.

The woman in the hospital bed slowly turned her head to look at him. She was emaciated and pale, so white she almost blended with her hospital gown. There was no color in her lips. There was an IV in the back of her almost transparent hand, which was purple from being used as a pincushion by successive IVs. She looked horribly frail.

When Fu Jiahui saw him, she didn't speak or smile. Her face was still unchangingly cold, her gaze haughty and indifferent, paring away the power and position of the middle-aged man in front of her. She only said, "You're here? Sit."

Lu Youliang pulled over a little stool and sat down, curling up his legs. "Is your daughter not here?"

"No need for small talk. You haven't come to visit the sick," Fu Jiahui interrupted him without answering. "You don't come without even a piece of fruit when you're visiting the sick."

Lu Youliang only then came to himself and lowered his head somewhat abashedly to look at his empty hands. "I..."

"Say what you have to say," Fu Jiahui said dully. "I don't have long to listen, so spare me the extraneous bits."

Lu Youliang was silent for a good while, fingers lightly tapping on his knee. Using all his deliberation, he spoke: "I only found out about your diagnosis last month. I was startled and afraid that a widowed mother and her daughter wouldn't be able to deal with all the petty business that comes with treating an illness long-term, and I didn't know how much money a major illness like this would cost and how much insurance would cover. I was afraid your means would be straightened and rushed over to bring money to your house."

Fu Jiahui pursed her lips; it might have been a smile. "Director Lu, I thank you for that."

"But while I was on the balcony smoking, you put the money back into my bag."

"I've been quite well-off these last few years. I have no use for your money," Fu Jiahui said. "What, was there any missing?"

"There wasn't." Lu Youliang looked at her with a sorrowful and bewildered expression, gently saying, "There was something added."

Fu Jiahui realized something and immediately closed her eyes. The two of them, one sitting and one lying down, were like two not especially aesthetically pleasing human statues, each frozen in the passage of wearying ages. Then Director Lu gently took out the little listening device and put it at Fu Jiahui's bedside.

"I knew someone had touched my bag, but I wasn't overly suspicious, because I knew at a glance that it had been you secretly putting the money back. I wasn't going to carefully go through it because of that." Lu Youliang's eyes were a little bloodshot. He said, "Sister-in-law, when Lao Yang was alive, when he talked about you, he always said you were bold but cautious, that there was nothing you wouldn't dare to do. We all joked and said he was crazy about his wife. I believe it now."

Fu Jiahui was looking at him expressionlessly. "How restrained, Director Lu."

"I'm an open book. If you're willing to listen, then listen. Anyway, I'm an unprepossessing old man. I'm not afraid of anyone taking advantage of me, and I have nothing to be ashamed or angry about." Lu Youliang looked down, tightly clenching his fists, and took a deep breath. "Sister-in-law, let me ask you something—that day when Luo Wenzhou and the others went to arrest Lu Guosheng and the information nearly got out ahead of them, was that...was that you?"

Luo Wenzhou, standing at the door of the hospital room with his hand raised to knock, froze.

Suddenly he heard the sound of a wheelchair next to him. Luo Wenzhou stiffly turned his head and saw that Chang Ning had gotten a wheelchair from somewhere and was pushing over Tao Ran, who ought to have been in bed. Luo Wenzhou blankly met his eyes, then suddenly felt that he'd returned to the day three years ago when he'd learned of Lao Yang's death. His ears had heard it and delivered it to his central nervous system, and his central nervous system had been unable to handle it, leaving him looking on helplessly at himself.

After a long time, a light laugh came from the hospital room. Fu Jiahui said, "Director Lu, you're infinitely perceptive. Don't you know everything?"

Luo Wenzhou shook, clutching the door frame.

"Why?" Lu Youliang had come emotionally prepared, but when he heard these words, his chest ached. He spoke almost a little incoherently. "I don't understand, it's... Did someone coerce you? Huh? It must be the child—it must be... You can tell us, I'll send people to guard her twenty-four hours a day, if we can't even protect our brother's wife and child, how the fuck can we have the face to continue in this profession..."

Fu Jiahui interrupted him. "Lao Yang himself didn't know who killed him, what do we amount to!"

Lu Youliang looked at her in disbelief.

"What, did I say something strange?" Fu Jiahui sneered. "Hey, Director Lu, haven't you just gotten through being investigated? Don't you know how Gu Zhao died, how Lao Yang died, too? Lao Yang even wrote a testament, made all his preparations, but as always evil advances faster than good. Could you save him? Were you in time?"

Lu Youliang said, "Lao Yang... Lao Yang also..."

"I'll be gone soon," Fu Jiahui continued, completely ignoring him. "I'll be dead soon... Lao Lu, they didn't only find this illness at the end of the year—there were signs long ago. When you reach this stage, you know that people can get premonitions of the time they'll die. So I said to my brothers and sisters, I may not be able to wait."

"Your... What brothers and sisters?" Lu Youliang felt absolute terror.

"Brothers and sisters with the same fate as me." Fu Jiahui's voice lowered. "Those who have met with the greatest injustice in the world. The police have no way to catch the criminal for you, the law has no way to give you justice. You raise a cry, everyone looks at you and accords you a few tears and says you're pitiable. You think the whole world will support you, but times change, and you find that people forget you as soon as they're done pitying you, and you have to deal with it yourself. If one person can't deal with it, then all of you join hands—isn't it effective? You've finally started ferreting out the mole, reopening the old case.

"As for leaking information, I'll apologize to you for that. All of this was rushed because of my health. Some details weren't perfectly prepared. Our enemy is sinister and cunning, and very dangerous. During the business of the Zhou family, we already put them on alert, and even more so during the time with Wei Zhanhong. They seized one of our brothers and got our communications record from him, but luckily it didn't impact the grand scheme."

Lu Youliang heard something in her few glancing words. His ears hummed. "The Zhou Clan... Wei Zhanhong... Lu Guosheng committing murder, it was led by you people, planned by you? The 'go ask shatov' in the Lu Guosheng case was one of your people? You knew ahead of time that that little boy was going to die, and, and you sat there waiting and watching? Sister-in-law, that child was younger than Xinxin, are you...are you crazy? Does Xinxin know about this?"

Fu Jiahui didn't answer him. She calmly said, "Haven't you heard? 'Bad people are carved out of the good7.'"

In a flash, Luo Wenzhou remembered—Xiao Haiyang had mentioned that he'd only noticed something was wrong because he'd heard Yang Xin "inadvertently" mention the gossip she'd heard in the dining hall. Had she really inadvertently heard the gossip? Or had she known that someone was putting on a performance of a murder attempt on Yin Ping and had purposefully prompted an obtuse performer into position?

Yang Xin knew. Not only did she know, she had taken part. Only she was young and her performance was a little stiff. She couldn't be as smooth as an adult... but it had been enough to fool Xiao Haiyang.

This was a little girl he had watched grow up. When she'd been in junior middle school, Luo Wenzhou had taken some people to beat up a delinquent who'd been pestering. In senior middle school, he'd helped her contact teachers for makeup lessons. Every time she'd succeeded on a mock exam before her university entrance exam, Lao Yang had given him an earful about it...

Luo Wenzhou heard Lao Lu ask loudly, "Who are you people? Who's leading you? Who's planning this?"

Fu Jiahui said almost inaudibly, "We are...the people who...bring past stories...one after another, without error...in front of you once again. We are the reciters of the stories. We..."

The hospital room was suddenly silent. Then came Lao Lu's voice, a mixture of anger and shock: "Sister-in-law!"

Luo Wenzhou pushed open the door and saw that the ashen-faced woman in the hospital bed had her eyes closed. There was a trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth. While it was cold, it wasn't mocking. It was almost serene.

Full of the serenity of sleep.

In all these years, Luo Wenzhou had rarely gone in front of her to invite a snub. It had been a long time since he'd had a good look at her. Even since she'd come to the hospital, he'd always hurriedly called in with others. For a moment he nearly thought she was a stranger he didn't recognize.

Director Lu looked up and called to him, "Get a doctor!"

Luo Wenzhou woke as if from a dream. He ran.

When he'd just run out of the hospital room, he saw a human figure flash by in the corridor. It had looked like Yang Xin!

Luo Wenzhou turned his head and hurriedly said to Chang Ning, "Call someone!" Then he took to his heels in pursuit.

Fei Du was ensconced in the couch in Luo Wenzhou's house, staring at the clock on the white wall going forward bit by bit. He was frowning as he pondered something.

Suddenly, there was a clatter in the kitchen, interrupting Fei Du's train of thought.

He turned his head in time to witness Luo Yiguo's "heroic bearing" after falling on its butt from somewhere.

When Luo Wenzhou's parents had come at the end of the year and bought too many snacks for Luo Yiguo, the cat of their own flesh and blood, they hadn't all fit into the original place, so Luo Wenzhou had freed up a special cupboard to put President Guo's cat products into. The cupboard was in the kitchen, up by the ceiling. There was no handle on the door. A human had no trouble opening it, but it was rather difficult for a cat's paw.

Normally, as long as it wasn't locked, Luo Yiguo could easily open the door to any room or cupboard; it was rather skilled in the profession of sneaking food. Adding in that it had recently been ordered to watch its weight, its gluttony had become towering, and it couldn't resist using its own paws to assure it was well fed. First it leapt from the top of the fridge, hitting the cupboard door with matchless precision, attempting to pull the cupboard door open. Not expecting there to be nowhere to grab hold of on the smooth door, Luo Yiguo smacked itself into a wedge of cat, then slipped down, flailing its claws and baring its fangs.

But it wouldn't admit defeat. It climbed up to try once again.

Fei Du unsympathetically looked on as Luo Yiguo suffered a crushing defeat, his gaze falling on an empty can in the trash, which hadn't been taken out yet.—Right, he really had taken out a can for Luo Yiguo that day and had later been distracted by other things and forgotten about it. He hadn't expected that he would remember it in his dream.

He opened a notepad on his phone and looked at the vague notes he'd left himself that morning—the can of cat food, Luo Wenzhou angry, Tao Ran injured, suffocation, the origin of the code, the woman's scream...

CHAPTER 150 - Edmond Dantès XXI

Fei Du strolled to a corner of the living room. There was a very elegant little whiteboard standing there. He was the one who'd bought it, not expecting that he'd use it only a couple of times before it became the tool of an individual surnamed Luo.—Before, Luo Wenzhou had simply been long-winded; now, in the midst of his jabbering, he also wanted to sum up all the trifling analyses in that jabbering, hanging them up on the whiteboard, accomplishing an omnidirectional exhortation directed at Fei Du's eyes and ears; it was very deranged.

Fei Du hesitated. Out of consideration for a certain person's toil, he couldn't bear to clean it. He flipped the whiteboard over, picked out a marker, and drew a coordinate plane with the x-axis showing time and the y-axis showing source of stress.

Compared to things that had happened recently, more distant memories were more malleable, with a greater likelihood that the brain would suitably vary and revise them.

And compared to immaterial little matters, the greater an impact a source of stress had on a person, the greater the feeling of indisposition it would create. It was also more likely that they would be distorted when reflected by the unconscious in a dream.

Not opening the can of cat food was a minor event that had just happened to Fei Du that day. It was a very shallow memory. He thought that instead of saying he'd dreamed it, it was better to say that he'd remembered it while half asleep. He drew a slash at the origin of the coordinate plane.

Then there was the circumstance of Luo Wenzhou being angry and himself not being able to coax him out of it.

Luo Wenzhou really had been a little fretful that night, Fei Du had felt it, but it hadn't amounted to anger. But in the end Fei Du hadn't clearly worked out whether he'd really coaxed him out of it. Because of this, perhaps he'd kept thinking it over in his dream, and his dream for some reason had made a big fuss over a minor issue, enlarging this slight concern.

Fei Du was dubious, feeling that he'd recently had less to worry about, so trifling matters could all take up space. He pondered a moment with his head tilted, then went down along the "source of stress" axis and drew a second stroke.

Next was "Tao Ran injured" and "suffocation," two entirely separate things that had been mixed into the same scene.

At this point, Fei Du put down the marker and frowned deeply, pacing a few steps in front of the whiteboard, not quite able to complete his analysis.

People's consciousness and memories hid very complicated projections and very subtle distortions. Surface logic and unconscious logic seemed to use different languages. Although Fei Du considered himself very open towards himself, it was still hard for him to objectively decipher that day's series of dreams, which was stuck like a fishbone in his throat.

Generally speaking, a dream that could startle someone awake must have touched some deep-seated anxiety and fear.

But Fei Du had examined himself, and he believed that he didn't have anxieties; fears were out of the question. For him, "fear" was like a celebrity on TV—he knew such a person existed, could see them every day on the screen, but as for how they looked in reality and what their temper and disposition were like...he had no way to judge.

He hadn't felt that he'd been in any way not calm when he'd heard the news of Tao Ran being taken to the hospital. The car crash had already happened, and only the doctors could remedy that; it had nothing to do with him. Fei Du remembered he had only spent the whole journey considering the sequence of events.

Could it be that "Tao Ran being injured" had been a huge source of stress for him, going so deep that it had touched some deeper and more intense thing in his memories?

In his dream, Tao Ran, who had been hit by a car, had appeared with his face showing signs of asphyxiation. So following that line of reasoning, an asphyxiated face was something else in his memories...but where had he seen it?

Luo Yiguo had tried a few times without being able to open the pestilential cupboard and could only run over with its tail stuck up to beg Fei Du. It fawningly rubbed Fei Du's pant leg with its round head and patted Fei Du's lower leg with its front paws.

Fei Du bent down and lifted it in front of his eyes, holding its front paws. Luo Yiguo was always very docile when it was in search of food. Its tail waved back and forth under it as it tried to force a delicate and charming expression of perfect innocence out of its fierce-looking features. It made a thin, pitiful cry.

Fei Du considered the cat's face for a while, thinking he wouldn't have superimposed the faces of those suffocating, struggling little animals onto a human face; the difference in the structure of the features was too great.

Luo Yiguo thought there was some game and meowed elaborately at him.

"Nope." Fei Du unfeelingly put Luo Yiguo back on the ground and proclaimed, "Luo Wenzhou is the only animal I can't pick up, and that's enough."

Luo Yiguo: "..."

All these two-leggers were worthless!

Fei Du considered, wiped away the writing on the whiteboard, and sent a message to Luo Wenzhou that said: "I'm going home to get something," then put on his jacket and went out.

He'd determined to return to his old house to have a look at the basement. He had passed a lightless childhood there, borne the correction of electric shock and medication countless times, even witnessed his mother's death. Fei Du truly couldn't understand why there would be a flaw in his memory of the time he'd snuck into the basement.

Luo Wenzhou had no time to look at his phone. He was chasing after the barely-glimpsed Yang Xin.

When he came to the door of the stairs, Luo Wenzhou encountered a large crowd of family members, presumably some patient's extended family turning out in full force; there were some elderly ones who'd come leaning on canes. They were firmly blocking the door of the stairs, separating him from Yang Xin.

Luo Wenzhou looked at the trembling old men and women. He really didn't want to push his way through a crowd of grandpas and grandmas who needed looking after, but Yang Xin had already vanished in the moment he'd been hesitating. Urged by the emergency, Luo Wenzhou bent his head and pushed open a window in the corridor. While a passing nurse's aide yelled in surprise, he stepped up on the windowsill and climbed down from the third floor, using the second floor's slightly projecting windowsill as a buffer. Then he leapt right down onto the artificial lawn below, rolled, and ran off before the surrounding crowd could lift their cell phones.

The main hall was overcrowded but could still be called orderly. Luo Wenzhou charged in ferociously, startling all the medical personnel on duty. A hospital guard immediately went over to question him. Luo Wenzhou carelessly shoved his work ID at the guard. "Police. Did you see a girl around twenty coming downstairs just now?"

Before the guard could speak, Luo Wenzhou glimpsed Yang Xin out of the corner of his eye, having just come down the stairs at the other end of the corridor. Yang Xin, taken unawares, met his eye. A complicated expression appeared on her tidy little face, like she was holding back from expressing pain and rage. Then she resolutely ran for the back door.

Luo Wenzhou was so angry his lungs were about to evaporate out of his head. "Stop right there!"

There was a little road at the inpatient department's back door, across which was the large hospital parking lot. The distance between Luo Wenzhou and Yang Xin was constantly decreasing. Just then, a sedan suddenly drove out of the parking lot and came right at him. Luo Wenzhou looked at the driver's face—it was the fake patrolman he and Fei Du had run into at the scene of the murder by the Drum Tower!

In a moment of desperation, he leapt up onto the hood of the car and rolled to the other side. Luckily the driver hadn't planned to run him over; the car window was half rolled down, and there seemed to be a trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth. He nodded urbanely to Luo Wenzhou, then floored the gas pedal, practically vanishing from the parking lot in a puff of smoke. Meanwhile, Yang Xin had jumped into a car and disappeared without a trace.

Luo Wenzhou's thighs had been painfully scraped by the collision just now. He couldn't resist letting loose a curse: "Motherfucker!"

Fu Jiahui had been taken in for emergency treatment. Chang Ning, meanwhile, had very considerately withdrawn, going out to buy them some drinks. Lu Youliang and Tao Ran were waiting in the oppressive hospital corridor in mutual silence. They looked up together when Luo Wenzhou, covered in fury and soil, returned.

Luo Wenzhou found a corner and patted the soil off of himself. "She got away. Two cars, one VW Bora, one Jinbei. I took down the license plate numbers and called for them to be stopped."

Lu Youliang didn't answer. He tilted up his head and leaned heavily against the wall.

Tao Ran was silent for a while. "When we were investigating Feng Bin's death, shiniang called me to come to her house, gave me shifu's testament, and...and while I was distracted put a listening device in my bag, exactly as the same as the ones on Director Lu and Xiao Wu. When Xiao Wu told me today, I...I actually..."

Tao Ran couldn't quite finish. He stared wide-eyed at Luo Wenzhou for a while, then continued with difficulty. "When I finished reading shifu's testament, there was a period where I actually felt a little gratified, thinking that shiniang's frostiness towards us all these years hadn't been her own doing. She didn't hate us, didn't disdain us, it was only that shifu had told her to distance herself from us."

But thinking about it now, if it had only been the distance of secret troubles, would they, criminal police officers who relied on their piercing observation skills for their next meal, really have had no idea? If it hadn't been genuine hatred, could it have kept Luo Wenzhou from coming to her door for three years?

"Xiao Wu? You mean that Yin Ping being hit was also their plan?" Luo Wenzhou's brain, boiling with fury, gradually cooled, and he sat down a little wearily next to Lu Youliang.

"Was that to frame Lao Zhang, too?" Lu Youliang asked.

"Yes. I suspect shiniang was tricked," Tao Ran said hoarsely. "The person plotting this behind the scenes was the one who framed Gu Zhao and killed shifu. If Old Cinder really was Yin Ping under a false name, then it's likely he had an important lead, so they wanted to kill him to silence him. He didn't die, so they wanted to use him to frame Director Zhang again... It would be easy to explain to shiniang and the others, you'd just have to say that Yin Ping didn't have any evidence, and even if he got out and testified, his testimony wouldn't be credible. It was better to use him as a prop."

Luo Wenzhou had his elbows on his knees and his hands lightly pressed together, propping his chin. "Uncle Lu, I actually came here today to ask you about someone."

"Do you want to ask about Fan Siyuan?" Lu Youliang said.

Luo Wenzhou stared. "How did you know?"

Lu Youliang was silent for a long time before quietly saying, "I guessed... Her tone talking to me and her diction made me think of him."

Luo Wenzhou and Tao Ran both looked at him.

"Fan Siyuan was my teacher, too... He must have taught Lao Yang as well." Lu Youliang considered, then slowly said, "He was young then, only a few years older than us, but he was very charming. Sometimes you thought that when he looked at you he knew what you were thinking. He was talented, too, widely learned, with a powerful memory. He'd published many articles, and he taught extremely well... It wasn't the fashion to grade your teachers then, or else he would have been the most highly rated teacher among the students. When there were difficult students that the academic departments or the ideological and political teachers couldn't handle, they'd call him in and get a guaranteed result. There was one in our dormitory who got called in for a chat with him for an hour. I don't know what he said, but when he got back, he cried his eyes out, wanting nothing but to start afresh and do right."

"And Gu Zhao came in contact with him, too, right?" Luo Wenzhou said. "I looked at his resume. When Officer Gu did his graduate program, it was under him."

"Yes." Lu Youliang nodded. "Gu Zhao was sincere. He didn't go back to school to get a graduate degree in order to win promotion, he really wanted to learn. He put in a lot of time, took notes on all the books he read, never rested on weekends. If he didn't understand something, he'd keep asking until he got it clear. For a while every time he opened his mouth it was to talk about Teacher Fan. At his graduation he invited some guests, and we all went, along with Fan Siyuan."

"His relationship with Fan Siyuan was very good."

"Very good..." Lu Youliang hesitated, then said, "Oh, very good. Gu Zhao actually wasn't a very lively or outgoing person. He treated close friends and distant acquaintances very differently. You could tell he really got on pretty well with Fan Siyuan. But who knows what that person was thinking?"

"He launched the first Picture Album Project?" Luo Wenzhou asked. "What actually happened? Uncle Lu, is Fan Siyuan really dead?"

A doctor hurriedly went by. Lu Youliang looked uneasily towards the end of the hallway, as though worried some bad news would come from that direction.

"When you read them afterwards, some of the papers he published already had symptoms of extremism," Lu Youliang said. "We just weren't paying attention back then. Psychological profiling was just getting popular in this country at the time. Fan Siyuan took the lead in requesting this 'establishing a record of criminals' psychological profiles' project, wanting to research old files, reexamine some unsolved cases, find new breakthroughs. He rounded up some frontline criminal policemen at the City Bureau... The research project was a political assignment, outside of daily work, of course whether you participated or not depended on whether you were willing, but we all participated—because the National Road 327 case, where the main culprit hadn't been brought to justice, was also part of it. It had been less than a year since Gu Zhao's death then. We still hadn't been able to take a breath and get past it. I knew many of our brothers were still privately making inquiries."

"But psychological profiling can't serve as evidence in court," Luo Wenzhou said. "All the unsolved cases in the Picture Album Project in fact had suspicious parties without effective evidence against them. Unless they'd made false confessions under torture..."

"That couldn't have happened." Director Lu smiled bitterly. "One of the charges against Gu Zhao was abuse of police power. We had people watching every move we made. We all kept our tails between our legs and behaved ourselves, not daring to take a single step out of bounds... I accompanied Fan Siyuan on visits for one of the cases. After we got back, he suddenly said to me, 'Sometimes when I think about it, I really don't know who the law is meant to protect. The people restricted are always the ones who observe laws and disciplines. It's unfair.' I thought something was off about him then, but I didn't make too much of it... But then, everything started to go wrong."

Luo Wenzhou said, "You mean the suspects dying one after another in unusual circumstances?"

"Yes. The means were exactly the same as the deaths of the victims in the corresponding cases, and there were many details about the cases that we hadn't made public. So the Picture Album Project was immediately called to a halt, and all the personnel concerned were suspended and submitted to investigation," Lu Youliang said. "Fan Siyuan vanished when the investigators went to find him. He wasn't at home or at school...or anywhere. He was under heavy suspicion at the time, but it was only suspicion. There was no evidence. The bureau debated for a long time between setting him down as 'missing' or 'escaped suspect.' Then, in consideration of the City Bureau's image, they only announced that he was 'missing.' All the cases in the Picture Album Project were either handled or sealed. The search only continued privately.

"Three months later, one of his relatives received a testament. At the same time, the bureau received a report that said Fan Siyuan had appeared in the Binhai District. Binhai was even more desolate then than it is now. We went over following the report and nearly caught him."

"Nearly?"

"Fan Siyuan jumped into the ocean in the course of the pursuit," Lu Youliang said. "There were bloodstains on a reef, but his corpse was never dredged up. He remained missing. But from then on, it was as though he'd vanished off the face of the earth, and there weren't any similar cases... You know that as soon as a serial killer starts killing, it's very hard to stop. So gradually everyone began to think that he was really dead. A few years later his family had a problem with their house being torn down. For the sake of the property, his relatives came to request a declaration of death. On the record, Fan Siyuan is officially 'dead.'"