Dumbstruck, Luo Wenzhou watched Fei Du, hands in his pockets, walk into the room. He’d changed into the clothes of an academic style; there was even a book stuck under his arm to complete the disguise. Knocking lightly on the doorframe, Fei Du swept his gaze over the whole Criminal Investigation Team, which was giving off an air of needing support, and issued a collective nod in greeting. “Is my desk still in its place?”
Though Fei Du hadn’t spent very long at the Criminal Investigation Team, since ancient times it had been true that it was easy to go from frugality to extravagance but difficult to go from extravagance to frugality; there was no harm if there was nothing to compare with; everyone remembered the midnight snack specially delivered by the six-star hotel and the endless drinks and snacks. Under the influence of this powerful sugar-coated bullet, they’d nearly developed a conditioned reflex—on seeing this handsome man, their first reaction was to secretly start salivating.
Luo Wenzhou looked on as his unworldly lackeys displayed their atrocious behavior, occupying his office and clustering around Fei Du as though welcoming a household god of wealth; then he finally came around—no wonder when he’d told Fei Du not to come pick him up last night, the wretched child had agreed so readily!
Tao Ran tapped on his shoulder from behind. Lowering his voice, he said to Luo Wenzhou, “Are you two spicing things up?”
Luo Wenzhou at once restrained his lost expression and displayed an unfathomable coolness, meaningfully saying to Tao Ran, “Oh, you. A person like you, sitting at home all day fantasizing about a wife, presently belongs to the germinal stage of socialism, do you understand? Germinal! You haven’t even managed being well-fed and clothed, and you’re going after cultural and ideological attainments? Spicing things up has nothing to do with you.”
Tao Ran: “…”
With deliberate impatience, Luo Wenzhou looked at his watch. “Only coming over at this hour—was he reserving a table at the dining hall? I really can’t do anything with him.”
Tao Ran maintained his smile, earnestly pondering how to break off relations. “Weren’t you just going to pay home visits to those runaway students?”
“That’s right.” Luo Wenzhou waved his invisible tail. “If I weren’t waiting for him, I’d have left already. He’s holding me up.—Fei Du, don’t waste time, if there’s anything you need me to sign, put it in order right away.”
Tao Ran watched Luo Wenzhou pull apart the crowd to go into the room and grab Fei Du. He really couldn’t resist smiling, feeling that his two anxieties had cancelled each other out, like fighting fire with fire. He truly felt at ease. But his easy smile hadn’t yet fully formed when the phone in his pocket vibrated. Tao Ran fished it out to look and saw that Chang Ning had sent him a message.
Chang Ning said: “My friend gave me two tickets to a water acrobatics performance this weekend. She just ditched me at the last minute. Do you want to come?”
Like someone suffering from dyslexia, Tao Ran spent ten minutes reading this short message, wanting nothing better than to pull every word apart and chew it over, swallowing it down into his belly.
Chang Ning wasn’t one of those straightforward young ladies. Even when she was inviting him to see a performance, she had to first give a long string of reasons. And for her, this was already a clear display of her intentions, but…
When Lao Yang had been alive, he’d talked quite a lot with Tao Ran—each time he’d seen Luo Wenzhou’s revolting “Why the hell am I so handsome?” attitude, he’d wanted to complain about him and couldn’t calm down.
Not long before his death, Lao Yang had shown Tao Ran a picture on his phone of his daughter’s university admission notice, showing off. Then, thinking of something, he’d suddenly sighed and said to Tao Ran, “A blink of an eye, and my child is so grown up. My generation has muddled its way through more than half our lifetimes. I remember when her mom first agreed to marry me. It was my superior who introduced us. I felt so happy then, thinking that I’d somehow managed to trick myself a wife and wouldn’t have to be a bachelor anymore. I didn’t think of anything else. Now I think I was too careless. I only thought about how good she was. I didn’t know I was a burden.”
At the time, Tao Ran had laughed and ridiculed the old fellow for bragging while pretending to complain and hadn’t taken it to heart. He’d only thought back to it long after, understanding what he’d meant. In times of peace, who didn’t want a family to spend his days with, a wife and kids and a warm house? But in times of danger, you’d want nothing better than to be a monkey who’d emerged spontaneously from a crack in a stone, without father or mother, without family or friends, a barefoot ruffian, stark naked and free of cares.
Tao Ran sighed softly. As his colleagues babbled next to him, he deleted the “All right” he’d nearly sent and instead replied, “I’m sorry, I have to work overtime this weekend.”
He wanted to use the weekend to secretly go see shiniang, even if shiniang wouldn’t see him, and drop some things off to display his kindly intentions. The photographs Lao Yang had left behind were still waiting for him to investigate, and there were also those shocking phrases… Tao Ran pinched the center of his brow, feeling that in his bones he wasn’t the sort of person who did great things; as soon as he took anything to heart, he’d be uneasy night and day, tossing and turning endlessly. In spite of himself, he envied Luo Wenzhou, who’d use the sky as a blanket if it came falling down.
Ten minutes later, Luo Wenzhou, wrapped in his comforter the thickness of the sky, kidnapped the Criminal Investigation Team’s chief financial backer.
“President Fei, I bet you’ve never gotten a telling off in your life?” Luo Wenzhou said, sitting in the car. “Come on, I’ll take you to get a telling off—the Xingfu Gardens Estate on Hongzhi Road, turn on the GPS if you’re not familiar with it, let’s go.”
Luo Wenzhou had thought all along that if there was anyone who could say anything useful, it would be that pudgy little Zhang Yifan, so he was planning to go talk to him again.
These students had already been questioned at the City Bureau the day before, and today Xiao Haiyang and the others had gone over again. The parents were already out of patience. They might agree once or twice but not a third time; going again this time, even using his belt to think, Luo Wenzhou could imagine the expressions the parents would make.
As Luo Wenzhou considered this, he opened Xiao Haiyang’s record and political examination, which he’d gotten from HR—Xiao Haiyang’s parents had divorced, and his mother had died of illness. His father had had custody of him before he’d grown to adulthood. His father and stepmother ran a car dealership, and he had a younger half-brother who was about to take his university entrance exams. His family circumstances were all right, but they weren’t wealthy. The family was all ordinary people. No close relatives had been involved in a crime, died a violent death, or even had any background with the public security authorities. He himself had graduated a few years ago and his background was clean and simple, so there wasn’t much material.
Luo Wenzhou frowned—this was strange.
Fei Du glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t ask what he was reading, only pointed out to him, “We’re almost there.”
Luo Wenzhou closed Xiao Haiyang’s file and looked up at the big field of high-quality estates up ahead, temporarily calling back his thoughts. He gave a frustrated sigh and said, “How about this, you pretend to go to the bathroom and come back when they’re done throwing their tantrum.”
Fei Du unhurriedly drove ahead according to the GPS. “Don’t worry, as long as there’s a female member of the household, I won’t get a telling off.”
“…” Luo Wenzhou reached over and put a hand on his waist. “Seducing a married woman right in front of my face? Little whelp, you must not want to live anymore?”
Fei Du smiled silently.
However, President Fei didn’t have an opportunity to seduce a married woman—when they knocked on Zhang Yifan’s door, the trembling boy indicated that his parents weren’t home. They’d gone out for the evening to a dinner party.
The adults were usually busy, so they’d paid a great price to send their child to a boarding school, entrusting the teachers with full responsibility—this couldn’t be taken as not caring about the child; when they’d spent so much money, how could they not care?
As long as his grades and his manners were good, they’d reward him, buy him things. If he did something wrong, dared to run away, then of course he’d have to be punished, punished by going without meals, having his allowance taken away, being shut into the house to reflect on himself.
Clearly distinguished rewards and punishments: a principled education.
As for what the adolescent child was thinking, that wasn’t important. What valuable ideas could a group of little whelps have? There were children starving in Africa; what did this child, who could have anything he wanted, have to quarrel about?
“Do sit down.” Zhang Yifan was rather polite; he poured water for them. He was only very shy with strangers, unwilling to look up and meet his guests’ eyes, sitting in front of them looking as dejected as though he were being interrogated. “Some other police officers came by today. Do you want to ask the same questions?”
Luo Wenzhou looked him up and down. “Do you still remember me?”
Zhang Yifan looked at him quickly, then nodded.
Luo Wenzhou slowed his voice. “I don’t know whether you’ve heard. Last night, Xia Xiaonan slipped out of the hospital and climbed up to a rooftop—“
Zhang Yifan was surprised, immediately raising his head, his hands squeezing into fists. “Oh!”
“We rescued her.” Luo Wenzhou made a gesture. “Just a little more, and she’d have jumped off the building.”
First Zhang Yifan let out a big sigh of relief, then he hurriedly followed up, “Is she all right?”
“She wasn’t injured,” Luo Wenzhou said, watching the boy’s reaction, then adding, “Although after we brought her back, she admitted to us that she colluded with the murderer who killed Feng Bin, that she was the one who wanted to kill Feng Bin… You guys are already over fourteen, so I don’t think that can be called being all right.”
Zhang Yifan first opened his eyes wide and blurted out, “No!”
Then, all the blood drained clean out of his face. Zhang Yifan clenched his teeth. In the abundantly heated room, sweat gathered at the tip of his nose.
Just then, Fei Du put in a word. “Do you also like Xia Xiaonan?”
His words were like a restless spark. The pudgy boy’s face went from white to red, and he closed his mouth tightly, holding himself back so fiercely he seemed about to explode. But when Luo Wenzhou thought he wouldn’t be able to hold back any longer, the boy suddenly looked at Fei Du, gaze flitting over his coat, worn open, his wristwatch, and his indolent but alert posture. In that instant, Fei Du clearly read fear in the boy’s eyes.
As Fei Du stared, Zhang Yifan, like a ballon with the air let out, shriveled up in front of their eyes, tightly covering his mouth. Then, unable to sit still, the boy seemed to arrive at some decision. He stood up and went into his bedroom. A moment later, he came out carrying two envelopes and pushed them in front of Luo Wenzhou and Fei Du.
Luo Wenzhou took them in astonishment and opened them to have a look. He found that there were two bank cards inside.
“On those is the education fund my mom deposited for me and the New Year’s money I’ve saved up since I was little. The PIN is the same for both cards. It’s my birthday, the date you recorded at the police bureau—there should be 300,000 altogether… Oh, and there should also be some interest.” Zhang Yifan struggled to sit upright, using a posture he must have learned from some traitor to the nation bribing an enemy agent in a TV drama, clumsily lowering his voice to say his lines. “I’d like to ask you to look after Xia Xiaonan. She’s not that kind of person, there must be some misunderstanding here.”
Luo Wenzhou: “…”
Fei Du: “…”
This was a moment that could truly go down in history. The largest sum of money and goods Captain Luo had ever been offered as a bribe in his career, and the briber was a minor!
Where were today’s children learning these things from?!
Luo Wenzhou tapped gently with his fingers, returning the bank cards to the envelopes.
“You won’t tell me the real reason you ran away, won’t tell me about Feng Bin and Xia Xiaonan’s relationship, and won’t tell me who had a grievance against Feng Bin at school—and you want to use these things… to have me do what? Privately let Xia Xiaonan go?” Luo Wenzhou sighed wearily. “Darling, are you crazy?”