Chapter 37

Lang Qiao hadn't had her fun yet; she was planning to follow on the heels of her victory, ganging up with her colleagues to continue encircling Luo Wenzhou. But unexpectedly she looked up and met the eyes of the portrait that had fallen on the ground and was so startled the alcohol flew out of her pores.

The public security system had people who specialized in making composite drawings. There was no lack of experts among them. Comparatively speaking, this portrait's execution belonged to a beginner level. But the odd thing was that the person in the drawing had an uncommonly lifelike charm; this face seemed to have been traced over countless times in the artist's mind, until the artist could resist no longer and had just applied their awkward technique to the paper.

"What is that?" said Lang Qiao.

Having been kicked over by Luo Wenzhou, Tao Ran had sobered up a little and noticed he had said something wrong. He stood up, leaning on the couch, and went out of the room to wash his face. When he returned, he and Luo Wenzhou cleaned up the stuff. "It must be Lotus Mountain. The old man went on about it all his life."

"Lotus Mountain" wasn't a mountain; it was the name of a place on the northern outskirts of Yan City. Earlier, it had fallen under the county seat administered by Yan City; over a decade ago it had been absorbed into Yan City and become a development zone.

On the page in the notebook, aside from the vivid portrait, there were several yellowed old photographs, stuck to the page with clear tape. It had been too long; they fell at a touch.

There were blurry casual snapshots, and there were photographic studio products typical of the era—all Dutch windmill backdrops and exaggerated lighting, the smiles of the young girls in them a little stiff, as in a staged photograph with too long an exposure period.

There were six photographs altogether.

There's a very strange thing about old photographs. All photo paper will fade and yellow just the same when put away for a couple of decades. If the person in the photograph is happy and well, the yellowing marks of age will call to mind long recollections, the quiet passage of time; but if the person in the photograph later met with some mishap, then when others look back on their earlier appearance, they'll get a strange, somber flavor from it, as if the person in the photograph's anger and dissatisfaction are possessing the static image, declaring something from the unseen realm.

"It's the Venerable Yang's?" asked Lang Qiao. "What was he doing looking after a development zone?"

"The City Bureau had a policy back then, those who were under thirty-five all had to get basic experience—either go to a local police station or go to one of the counties. My shifu and some others went to Lotus Mountain and stayed there half a year or more." Luo Wenzhou carefully pinched the edges of the photographs and stuck them back into the notebook. "They hadn't been there long when they ran into this case—you may never have heard of it. I wasn't old enough to attend school then."

"At the beginning, there was a man who came to report a case. He said his child had gone missing." Tao Ran flipped through the notebook. Aside from the photographs and the portrait, most of the notebook's contents were purely handwritten. The old criminal policeman's writing was quite beautiful, delicate, firm, and well-shaped. On the page before the photographs the characters "Guo Heng" were written; there was a triple-underline under the name. "Right, the person who reported the case was this Guo Heng. His eleven-year-old daughter had gone missing. Her nickname was 'Feifei.'"

At this point, Luo Wenzhou's hand paused on a thick sheaf of teaching materials, and he raised his head to give Tao Ran a puzzled look. "You're this drunk and you still remember what the girl was called?"

Tao Ran looked down and avoided his gaze. "After hearing the old man go on and on about it for so many years, I could recite the whole history from memory."

Chang Ning was usually busy at work and had little time to watch TV. For once she was in close proximity to people from the Criminal Investigation Team telling stories; in spite of herself, she very curiously asked, "And then what?"

"Back then it was common for parents not to be as careful with their children as now. An eleven- or twelve-year-old was already an older child. Going to school or to a classmate's house to play, they'd usually just say a word at home and then run off. The grown-ups wouldn't hover around them day and night.

"But Guo Fei was an especially well-behaved little girl. She went to school and went home at fixed times. If she came home five minutes late in the evening, she'd have a proper reason for it. Her family never had to worry about her studies. There was nothing special about the day she disappeared. Her classmates said, that day after getting out of school, Guo Fei didn't stay on. She promptly went home. It was about a fifteen-minute walk; the child had gone missing during those fifteen minutes. My shifu and the others followed her usual route, going back and forth over it dozens of times. At that time there weren't as many security cameras by the road as now, but there also weren't any especially out-of-the-way places along the route the child took to go home. It was summer then, and not very dark in the late afternoon. There were plenty of people coming and going outside. Reasonably speaking, if a girl that age had been grabbed off the street, even if there had been just a trace of something wrong. It's impossible that no one at all would have noticed.

"But when they had gone all over, they came up empty-handed. They turned everything upside down near the school without finding even a hair from the girl's head.—Sherlock Holmes has a famous saying, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (6)' So someone said, either an acquaintance had taken her, or the child had left home herself.

"Following the line of thinking that it had been an acquaintance, the police investigated the school's teachers and staff, the Guo family's friends and relatives, and even the stationery store and little supermarket the child usually went to… They summoned over a hundred people altogether, but they still came up empty-handed."

At this point, Tao Ran paused. "Just as their investigation had hit a wall, the girl's father suddenly received a phone call. No one spoke when he picked up, there was only the sound of a little girl shouting herself hoarse. The child's mother fainted when she heard it. The police immediately traced the phone number and found the location of the phone—it was a very remote telephone booth."

"There was no security camera?" Lang Qiao asked in surprise.

"No," said Luo Wenzhou. "The phone booth was at a waste transfer station and looked abandoned. Many people didn't even know the phone still worked. They found a bit of blood next to the phone booth; it matched Guo Fei's blood group, but they couldn't test the DNA then and had no way to determine whether it had actually been her. There were no fingerprints."

In Tao Ran's living room, no one spoke.

After a good while, Fei Du, who hadn't spoken all this time, put in a question. "There wasn't another phone call? No extortion, no ransom demand?"

"No," said Tao Ran. "After that phone call, the kidnapper didn't contact the girl's family again. They didn't want money, and they didn't make any requests."

Fei Du lightly shook his wineglass, sniffing its aroma now and then, as if the glass contained not a dry red picked up from the supermarket but Romanée-Conti.

"That's pretty strange," he said. "It sounds like the kidnapper wasn't aiming at the child, but wanted to torment the grown-ups—what did the girl's parents do?"

"Guo Heng himself was a middle school teacher, and the child's mother was a civil servant. The family's financial situation was pretty good for the time, but they were still only comfortably off, both ordinary wage workers. You couldn't really call them rich. The couple had both gone to school, they were both well-educated and reasonable, neither wildly ambitious in their careers. They got on well with their coworkers, there were no disputed interests, and the possibility of extramarital affairs had been eliminated."

An ordinary family, ordinary parents, an ordinary girl—not even a very pretty child—all living conventional lives. Just as unremarkable as a random passerby on the street. The police had dug down deep without digging up any unusual stories.

There's a proverb that says "a fly won't sting a seamless egg (7)", but the police had repeatedly combed through everyone connected with the Guo family, even analyzed all their private affairs with a magnifying glass; they had found that the girl Guo Fei and her family were in fact "a seamless egg."

Time elapsed and the silent kidnapper didn't speak again. Both the police and the girl's family knew that the chances of getting the child back had become remote; the best fate was that she had been sold to some place with out-of-the-way predilections, but the greatest likelihood was…

The police didn't have the first idea why the kidnapper had chosen this girl.

It was as if someone had tossed a die in the street and randomly grabbed whoever it landed on.

There was no apparent reason.

No one was safe in this world.

Lang Qiao asked, "And…the other five?"

"All the leads in Guo Fei's disappearance were cut short. There was nothing to be done but leave it unsolved. Later my shifu was recalled to the city—he was with the Xitai District Sub-Bureau's Criminal Investigation Team then. There was another missing child case in the jurisdiction. Another girl, twelve years old, also disappeared without a trace on her way home from school. The kidnappers were also silent. The most frightening thing was that two days after the girl went missing, her family received a phone call with a wailing child.

"My shifu immediately felt something was off and made the situation known to his superiors. The head of the Xitai District at the time decided to report up to the City Bureau. In the end they found that in all of Yan City, including the surrounding counties, there had been six missing child cases of this kind."

"Seven," Luo Wenzhou added. "The last surviving girl's home situation was special. She had no father, and her mother was a drunk, fooling around morning to night. The child went missing for several days and she didn't know. She never called the police. The City Bureau took the lead on this, transferred people over from all the districts, established a special investigation team. Lao Yang later transferred to the City Bureau because of that opportunity.—But there were no developments. There were no points of intersection between the missing girls except…"

At this point, Luo Wenzhou suddenly remembered something. His gaze fell on Chenchen, chewing a drinking straw as she listened attentively. After pausing, he steered his words onto another direction. "Except that the means of kidnapping were about the same."

"After Guo Fei's father heard about it, he took a long term unpaid leave and came over to the City Bureau to wait for a result from the special investigation team, but, unfortunately, in the end he lost hope." Tao Ran very respectfully stowed the old criminal policeman's notebook in the cardboard box. "Later the special investigation team dispersed. The only remaining people who still thought about the case were the victims's families, and my shifu, who had dealt with the case from the beginning. After another half a year, Guo Heng suddenly found my shifu and said he'd found a suspect. It was a teacher, named Wu Guangchuan—the person in the drawing. Wu Guangchuan was a teacher at 'Jinxiu (8) Middle School'. Jinxiu was the earliest private middle school of the time, a boarding school, recruiting students from the whole city. The school fees were high, the education quality was high. Quite a few parents in distant suburbs thought that the local middle schools wouldn't do and sent their children to Jinxiu. When Guo Fei went missing, Wu Guangchuan just happened to have come with a team to the Lotus Mountain area to recruit new students."

Chang Ning held her breath. "Was it him?"

"Wu Guangchuan was thirty-six years old then, he was divorced and lived alone. He did meet the requirements for the offender. Lao Yang privately went to shadow him and performed some illegal moves, but he didn't turn anything up. This Wu Guangchuan's temper was mild, he got on well with people, he was known far and wide as a good person. He regularly came into contact with children at work and had never crossed any lines. Lao Yang shadowed him for a while and thought it wasn't him, but Guo Heng was like someone possessed. He was simply positive that Wu Guangchuan was the kidnapper. Later Lao Yang withdrew, and Guo Heng went with a melon knife to find Wu Guangchuan. He stabbed him."

Lang Qiao cried out. "Did he die?"

"Yes, by the time they got him to the hospital, he wasn't breathing. In Wu Guangchuan's basement, they found the seventh missing girl, as well as the clothes of the six previous girls—the clothes had been cut into strips and had bloodstains matching the blood groups of the victims. That was how the serial child kidnapping case was resolved. But while the clothes were there, they couldn't find the girls themselves, dead or alive, and the suspect had died without giving testimony." Luo Wenzhou stood up and stretched. "Guo Heng had deliberately killed someone and was sentenced. Lao Yang could never let it go. He always thought that it was his error of judgement that had led to the later tragedy. He went on and on about it all his life.—Let's not mention it anymore. The suspect's ashes are cold. Eat."

Everyone enjoyed themselves at Tao Ran's house until the afternoon. The ones who had taken a taxi or the subway all scattered, and the ones who had driven their own cars stayed back to help Tao Ran clean up his new home while sobering up. Chang Ning and Chenchen went home, too.

Tao Ran had downed a few more glasses afterwards and couldn't quite stand up straight while washing the dishes. He nearly broke a dish, saving it at the last moment, and got chased away by Luo Wenzhou.

Luo Wenzhou washed all the dishes and put them away in a twinkling. When he returned to the living room, he saw Fei Du with his back to him, casually flipping through the old criminal policeman's notes.

He seemed to have eyes on the back of his head. He said to Luo Wenzhou, "Didn't you leave something out just now? The missing girls definitely had a point in common—was it the clothes?"

Luo Wenzhou leaned back against the wall and laughed in spite of himself. "How do you know? You aren't the killer's reincarnation?"

"You looked at Chenchen, then bit back your words." Fei Du turned around. "The clothes found in this Wu Guangchuan's basement, were they all floral-patterned dresses?"

As soon as Luo Wenzhou saw him, he remembered that unfortunate game machine and rather uncomfortably avoided his gaze. "You can teach a child to be careful of strangers, to be vigilant, but you can't make her scared of wearing floral-patterned dresses. Otherwise, what's the point of us?"

"Oh." Fei Du nodded lightly. "Captain Luo is right."

Having for once heard a few nice words out of his mouth and had his liver set tingling by his nod, Luo Wenzhou's inauspicious premonition came true the next second.

Fei Du quietly asked, "Aside from the little white flowers and the game machine…what else is there?"

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Author's Note:

(6) I feel bound to say that I've taken a liberty rendering this as a slight misquote; but people do almost inevitably misquote it, so it would feel strange using the quote as actually written.

(7) I.e., bad people can only influence those who are vulnerable.

(8) Meaning "beautiful as brocade," "splendid."