Chapter 50

"At 8:30 pm on the twenty-seventh, Xu Wenchao actually was at home." Tao Ran had first followed to the hospital and had a few words with the Chenchen, who was gradually regaining awareness, then had once again rushed back. On the way he'd received word and stopped on his way to verify Xu Wenchao's alibi. "I also checked into his take-out record for the past half-year. It's very regular, a handful of restaurants, the delivery people all know him."

A criminal policeman asked, "Could he have bought off the delivery person?"

"Go ahead and have a look into the witness's personal relationship with Xu Wenchao, but I think the possibility isn't great," said Luo Wenzhou. "Take-out delivery people are all kids, they don't stay long at their jobs. They change over every two or three months. At most they're passingly familiar with customers. It's not very possible that they'd perjure themselves in a major case of this sort for the sake of a customer who orders food. And besides, it's not every person who'd dare talk nonsense In front of the police… There's another point."

"What?"

"My shoes are a size forty-two." Luo Wenzhou lightly stamped one foot. "When Xu Wenchao came in in the afternoon, he was wearing sneakers and I couldn't really see, but judging from the leather shoes he was wearing when he came in now, my visual assessment is that they should be smaller."

There was an uproar in the conference room.

Just then, Lang Qiao came into the conference room last of all and flung herself into a chair. "Boss, hurry and get someone else to do it, I'm at my wits' end with that child. Looking at her gives me the creeps."

Luo Wenzhou asked, "What's happening with Su Luozhan?"

"Oh, she's extremely relaxed, eats and sleeps." Lang Qiao shook her head and took a can of coffee tossed by a colleague. "She's not afraid of grown-ups, and she's not afraid of the police. I still don't know what the theory is. Maybe she's too young and doesn't understand the consequences of what she's done, or maybe she's too crafty, knows she's young, and so she has no fear. If you talk to her nicely, she plays dumb, simpers and puts on a scene. If you try to scare her, she looks at you with a cheeky grin.—Oh, yeah, just now she asked me for a bottle of sweet milk. When she finished drinking it, she said, 'I'm sleepy, can I sleep for a bit?' And then she really did sleep. I'm telling you the truth, if I'd done a bad thing and got caught red-handed and taken to a public security bureau, I'd be scared to death. I definitely wouldn't be able to sleep. Is this child human?"

Luo Wenzhou didn't answer. With a very grave expression, he lit a cigarette. Without putting it in his mouth, he became lost in thought.

Without any doubt, Xu Wenchao had played some role in this business. Otherwise there couldn't be so many coincidences.

He had a series of ties to the cases twenty-some years ago and now, his relationship with Su Xiaolan and her daughter ran deep; Su Luozhan had called him twice from the crime scene and had accused him without any hesitation when the police had asked.

And his bearing the two times in one day that he'd been brought before the throne was very worthy of consideration. The first time, his bearing had been gentle and polite, but he'd shown himself as not the sharpest knife, readily resorting to the excuse of memory loss; and when pressed by Tao Ran into an awkward position, he seemed not to have expected such a development and panicked a little.

But the second time he was sharp and calm, methodical, his speech watertight. In the middle of the night, the police had burst into his home to arrest him, and he'd been fully dressed.

The first time Xu Wenchao had come, he'd indicated that he'd heard the radio broadcast and knew about Qu Tong's case. The information released to the public had of course not included concrete details, but the two keys points of "the night of the twenty-seventh" and "West Ridge District" had been there. He clearly had such a definite alibi, so why hadn't he mentioned it?

Had he been wholly unprepared, panicked, and forgotten, or had he not noticed that the police suspected him?

Or…had he just been testing the police force's reaction?

If it was the latter, then that was too frightening.

But no matter what, a person couldn't split himself in two, couldn't be in two places at the same time. That was an objective fact.

Luo Wenzhou muttered silently to himself for a moment, then knocked on the table. "Come on, everyone listen up, in a while I'll need your help getting some statistics…"

Just then, the conference room door was pushed open from outside. The officer on duty in the reception room stuck his head in and interrupted Luo Wenzhou. "Captain Luo, I think this is the take-out you guys ordered. They've delivered it."

Luo Wenzhou froze; before he could speak, some strapping young fellows who'd been rushing about half the night had already thrown themselves over, their eyes glinting green; then they took the bags, had a look, and were struck dumb.

What had been delivered in the middle of the night wasn't roasted skewers or malatang; it wasn't even McDonald's or KFC.

Altogether, two large bags had been delivered. One was a heat-preserving ready-to-eat bag, and the other was a cold-storage bag packed with dry ice, both printed with a sumptuous logo; the plates and cutlery, packed away in a special cardboard box, were so exquisite that they simply didn't seem like single-use products.

Once opened, they contained Chinese cuisine and Western cuisine, cold dishes and hot dishes; the cold-storage bag also contained a few cartons of very fresh ice cream, as if it had come from the dining room of some luxury hotel!

Luo Wenzhou choked himself half-dead on a mouthful of smoke.

Lang Qiao was the first to recover, deftly snatching up a carton of ice cream and hugging it to her chest. "My goodness, boss, you're too nice!"

Tao Ran, shaken, said, "What are you doing? Are you not planning on living for the second half of the month?"

"Boss, did you buy a winning lottery ticket?"

"You must have won big in the European Cup betting pool!"

"What are you saying, could our captain do that? Hey, Captain Luo, did your mom and dad suddenly give you spending money?"

"Spending money for no reason? To be paying special attentions out of nowhere, do you think they're bribing you because they're going to have a second child?"

Luo Wenzhou said, "…bribe my ass. Beat it!"

This truly was a group of beloved colleagues.

He turned over the heat-preserving bag and with a shock saw a familiar logo on it—he'd just been at their door.

The corner of Luo Wenzhou's eye began to twitch.

"Hey, this seems to be that nouveau riche hotel to the north," Lang Qiao said suddenly. "Their dining room is as snooty as all get-out. How come they're working in the middle of the night, and even…even delivering take-out? So in touch with the people!"

"Eating can't even stop up your mouth." Two small veins stood out at the corner of Luo Wenzhou's forehead. "Where the fuck are all these questions coming from? If you don't want to eat, get to work!"

Lang Qiao scrutinized Luo Wenzhou's expression, and the corpse of her long-dead teenage girl's heart twitched.

Thinking about it carefully, a midnight snack out of a romantic novel like this really didn't seem to fit with Captain Luo's "jianbing, fruit, warm soy milk" homebody style. A whole new line of thought poured into her brain. Lang Qiao blurted out, "Wait a minute, is someone trying to put the moves on you by sending you all your favorite foods on purpose… Ow!"

Luo Wenzhou had used a rolled-up paper to hit her squarely on the forehead.

Feigning deafness and dumbness, Luo Wenzhou forcibly ignored the subject of the midnight snack. Among the scents of food stuffs assaulting the nose, he unflappably picked up where he'd left off before the interruption. "You eat while I talk. I need all of you to split into two groups. The first group will go through the missing child database and pull the records of all missing child cases from each of the city's administrative districts and counties. Focus particularly on the children's sex, age, physical appearance at the time they went missing, and an outline of the details of the case. Using these four criteria, in that order, we'll roughly sift through them—first restrict the time to the last two years."

"You suspect Qu Tong wasn't the first?" asked Tao Ran.

"The suspect's lengthy stalking was done without leaving traces, and in an emergency situation they calmly carried off Qu Tong. That clearly shows they had a definite goal then, following and kidnapping. It doesn't feel like they acted on sudden impulse. I think Qu Tong definitely isn't the first." Heavily, Luo Wenzhou said, "Even if we can't find evidence this time, we'll have to find it for before.—The second group, I want you to dig into all of Su Luozhan, Su Xiaolan, and Xu Wenchao's materials: school transcripts, bank accounts, phone records, personal computers and other such equipment—thoroughly investigate everything."

These two assignments were like two great mountains. Even listening with your ankle, you could have heard the immense pressure settling over everyone's heads like the Five Elements Mountain (16). Some took notes, some kept their heads down and ate. Even the gourmet midnight snack had lost its flavor; no one cared now to probe into the truth about it.

Luo Wenzhou picked up a fried chicken wing with a paper napkin and in flash picked it clean, like locusts descending on a rice field. "This is all demanding work. Once you've finished replenishing your strength, get to it. Xiao Lang, come collect the results."

"Boss, should we question Su Luozhan again?"

"It's no use," said Luo Wenzhou. "Dealing with a grown-up, you can excite him, scare him, trick him, but this Su Luozhan… When she's sitting across from you, she doesn't consider you as the same type of creature as herself. Maybe in her eyes, there's no difference between humans and sheep, all prey and food. And she's also too young; her testimony can only be used as a reference. This has to be solid. The relative of a victim from the case twenty years ago is out the corridor now. I think none of us wants this to drag out until we retire—hop to it."

This sort of dry and dull work of sifting through documents couldn't get the adrenaline flowing; the small hours of the morning especially made people drowsy, and only by relying on inferior coffee could they force themselves to focus. The records of missing children were all very succinct: boy or girl, how old, when and how they disappeared… As for how the child had acted, what they'd liked, what their temperament had been, what family members still woke from nightmares every night, planning to spend the remainder of their lives immersed in a hopeless search—none of this would be reflected on paper.

All the tragedies spread out together were like an inscription tablet of the victims of a disaster, both heart-breaking and monotonous.

In the blink of an eye it was light; the conference room was piled with empty coffee cans and cigarette ends.

"Girls aged nine to fourteen, disappeared for no reason, no news to this day, excluding those who left letters saying they were leaving home and those whose deaths were later confirmed when their bodies were found. In the last year there were thirty-two in all, thirty-one in the year before that. Considering physical characteristics, removing those who developed comparatively early and rather resembled adults in appearance, as well as those who had yet to enter puberty and still looked like they'd just lost their first tooth, last year there were twenty-six cases, twenty the year before."

Luo Wenzhou poured water onto a damp towel and wiped his face. "Adding in the floral-patterned dress?"

"Seven last year, eight the year before." Lang Qiao looked up. Around her, her colleagues were all yawning their heads off; only she, her face white from the glare of the computer screen, all at once didn't have a trace of sleepiness in her bloodshot eyes. "Captain Luo, do you guys want to have a look?"

She linked the laptop to the conference room's projector, throwing the collected photographs up onto the projection screen. Tao Ran, halfway through a yawn, forced it back—

The fifteen girls, looked at individually, didn't look alike; but assembled together, their particular characteristics were strangely and endlessly diluted. Only the delicate quality belonging to girls between early childhood and teens was prominent, uncommonly unified; at a glance, one simply couldn't tell them apart!

Tao Ran whispered, "No way…"

These girls were like dried flowers sprinkled on the ground, submerged in the sea of missing child notices, gradually becoming pressed among the pages of unsolved cases, gone without a trace. If not for this chance, no one would have discovered that these cases had grown on the same vine.

This was a poisonous vine growing hidden in a deep forest under a bright sun; its root system was colossal, its tendrils dolorous, like an invisible net. Revealing only the tip of the iceberg already made one tremble in fear.

"Go back," said Luo Wenzhou. "Look ten years…no, twenty years back, trace all the way back to the Lotus Mountain serial kidnapping case!"

First thing in the morning, Fei Du had a change of clothes brought over. He arranged himself and had his assistant drive him to Dr. Bai's house. But the door was opened by a middle-aged man.

The man was of medium height, square-faced, with very broad shoulders. He wore glasses and was dressed so plainly as to be unnoticeable, but his gaze inexplicably made Fei Du frown.

His expression was neither powerful nor sharp, but it had a special presence, like a thin needle silently passing through a person's pores.

Fei Du stared, then very politely said, "Hello, I'm looking for Dr. Bai. I arranged to see her yesterday."

"Oh." The middle-aged man pushed up his glasses. "I know, you must be young Mr. Fei? Bai Qian is my spouse. Please come in."

As he spoke, Dr. Bai had already come out to meet her guest. The man seemed to be in a hurry to go; he said a warm goodbye to Dr. Bai, stuck his briefcase under his arm, and left.

"He works at Yan City Public Security University." Seeing Fei Du turn his head to look at the man, she gave a brief introduction. "In fact he's just a quote-spouting bookworm who can't do anything. Morning to night, he only teaches class and writes essays—that book you wanted to borrow was edited by him."

Fei Du's gaze fell on the book in his hand—Study on the Psychology of Criminal Abusers (3rd Edition)—lingering momentarily on the editor's name, Pan Yunteng.

"How have you been recently?" Dr. Bai poured him some tea. "Last time when you told me you wanted to do a post-graduate degree, you really gave me a scare. That was my first time hearing of a successful social figure like you having such a completely incongruous plan in life. Do you think you've flipped through too many scholarly texts with me?"

"I'm just a mascot to begin with," said Fei Du, not minding. "My father left me an outstanding team of professional managers who can cooperate and also balance each other out. They have no use for me taking everything onto myself. The other shareholders are even more eager for me not to put my hand in, just behave and collect my dividends. What everyone loves to see is for my type of useless 'son of the house' to go earnestly study something, instead of waving around a 'Westpac' diploma and making a spectacle of himself."

Surprised, Dr. Bai said, "For your requirements, wouldn't going abroad to get an MBA be more helpful? Our field is too out-of-the-way, isn't it?"

Fei Du laughed. "Dr. Bai, other wastrels like me are doing 'mystical studies' or 'specializing in the Beatles.' Comparatively speaking, my hobbies and interests aren't especially niche."

Dr. Bai laughed in spite of herself. "That's true, and anyway you don't need to worry about employment prospects.—Which area are you most interested in? Perhaps I could introduce you to an advisor."

"This area's pretty interesting." Fei Du waved the thick book in his hand.

Dr. Bai stared, then saw the young man's face show a trace of joking self-mockery. "I've heard there are quite a few fine-looking beauties in the public security system. What if I can put myself in a favorable position?"

When Fei Du said goodbye to Dr. Bai and left, it was already after noon. His fully-charged phone had lain peacefully in his pocket, not ringing. Fei Du thought it over a while, got his assistant's attention, and said, "Go to the City Bureau."

His assistant stared. "President Fei, what's happened? Are you going to report a case?"

Fei Du smiled at her. The assistant had been with him for several years and could identify the meaning of each of this playboy's smiles. She at once gave a shudder, feeling that this young master's tastes were becoming increasingly intense.

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Author's Note:

(16) From Journey to the West, used to suppress Sun Wukong.