On the morning of the third day after Hongyun collapsed, I saw a thick stack of case reporting materials sitting on my desk.
Zhou Qiming had drawn a red circle on the cover and written two words: Urgent Action.
I flipped to the first page.
Complainant: Zhang Xiuying, female, 67 years old, retired worker. Invested amount: 400,000 yuan. Recommender: Neighbor Wang. Contract stipulated an annualized return of 12%, guaranteed principal and interest.
Second page.
Complainant: Li Guoping, male, 72 years old, retired teacher. Invested amount: 800,000 yuan. Recommender: Introduced by a colleague. Contract terms identical to Zhang Xiuying’s.
Third page, fourth page, fifth page—
I flipped through them one by one. The structure of every single profile was almost identical: middle-aged or elderly, retired, introduced by acquaintances, signed a contract guaranteeing principal and interest, and transferred money into the exact same account.
When I flipped to the twelfth page, I paused to look at a set of figures.
Number of complainants: 317 people. Amount involved: Preliminary estimate of 210 million yuan. Filing times concentrated over the past two weeks.
An average investment of about 660,000 yuan per person.
660,000 yuan.
A retired elderly person’s life savings, plus their house, pension, and savings given by their children—that was roughly the figure.
Three hundred and seventeen people, three hundred and seventeen families.
I closed the materials.
By the time Zhou Qiming pushed the door open and walked in, I had already drawn the shareholding penetration diagram for Hongyun Investment on the whiteboard.
“Spotted it?” He set his teacup on the desk, remaining standing.
“The legal representative, Liu Jianguo, is merely a puppet.” I pointed at the top name on the whiteboard. “The ownership structure is stacked four layers deep, and the shareholders at every layer are nominees. The real controller is hidden at the very core.”
“Have you tracked them down?”
“Not yet. But there’s a problem with Hongyun’s capital flow.”
I spread out on the desk the bank receipts I had brought back this morning from Hongyun’s vacant office.
“Public records show Hongyun has a registered capital of ten million, but the bank statements show actual transaction volume tens of times that amount. Moreover—” I pulled out a receipt, “—most of the funds didn’t enter directly from the investors’ accounts. There was a layer separating them.”
Zhou Qiming picked it up and took a look.
“Investors wired money into an account designated by Hongyun, but this account wasn’t Hongyun’s corporate account—it belonged to an individual. Then, the money went out from this personal account in three directions—one portion entered Hongyun’s capital pool to pay out interest to earlier investors; one portion was transferred to a company called ‘Hengxin Investment’; and the third portion—”
“Where did the third portion go?”
I shook my head.
“That’s the problem,” I said. “The first two lines can be traced, but the third line broke off. It’s not that it can’t be investigated; it’s that after this money left the account, it never appeared again.”
“Like it was swallowed up.”
“Like it was transferred out,” I corrected him. “Being swallowed up and being transferred out are different. Swallowed up means the money is gone; transferred out means the money reached somewhere else. The difference is—if it was transferred out, there must be a recipient.”
Zhou Qiming lit a cigarette and leaned against the back of his chair. “You’ll lead this case. Three days—I want an investigation plan.”
“Manpower?”
“The entire First Detachment is yours. Wen Ruzhou goes to you, too.”
I glanced at him.
“What,” he gave a faint smile, “you don’t want her?”
“Didn’t say I don’t want her.”
“Then take her.” He flicked his cigarette ash. “Little Shen, this isn’t a small case. 317 people, over two hundred million yuan. If this isn’t handled well—”
He didn’t finish his sentence.
But I knew what he was going to say.
If handled poorly, it would turn into a mass incident.
“Understood.” I stood up. “I’ll give you the investigation plan tomorrow.”
Leaving the captain’s office, I ran into Wen Ruzhou in the corridor.
She was holding a cup of coffee and paused briefly when she saw me.
“Captain Shen, morning.”
“I read that report of yours on the Dingsheng case.”
“Mm.”
“The last note was well-written.”
She gave a faint smile: “Are you referring to the one that said ‘recommended to hold off’?”
“You know which line I’m talking about.”
Her smile remained unchanged, but the light deep in her eyes stirred slightly—as if confirming something.
“Have you heard about the Hongyun matter?” she asked.
“I’m leading it. You’re with me.”
“Alright.”
No extra words. She picked up her coffee and walked alongside me toward the office area.
After a couple of steps, she suddenly spoke up: “Captain Shen, did you draw the shareholding penetration diagram for Hongyun?”
“I did.”
“Four layers of nominee ownership?”
“Mm.”
“Then did you notice—” she paused to phrase her thoughts, “—what a four-layer nominee structure usually signifies in an economic crime case?”
“Two possibilities,” I said. “First, the controller doesn’t want to reveal their identity, using nominee layers as insulation. Second, the controller needs to make this money look legitimate, making the nominee structure itself a money-laundering tool.”
She nodded slightly. “Then which one do you think Hongyun is?”
“Both.”
“Mm, I think it’s both as well.” She tossed her coffee cup into the hallway trash bin. “But I have an additional thought.”
“Speak.”
“If the nominee structure serves both identity concealment and money laundering, then the innermost layer—the true controller—might not be a single person.”
“Why?”
“Because a single person doesn’t need four layers of nominees. Two layers are enough. Three layers are already the limit. Four layers—” She looked at me, “—a four-layer structure requires at least two nodes coordinating with each other to operate. One responsible for collecting money, one responsible for transferring money. The money collector faces the investors, while the money transferrer faces the capital chain. The two don’t know each other, or only communicate through an intermediary.”
“You mean—”
“Partners,” she said. “Not one controller, but two. One in front of the curtain, one behind the curtain. The one in front is Liu Jianguo; the one behind—”
She didn’t finish.
Because I had thought of it too.
“The one behind the curtain is the person we’re looking for,” I said.
“Mm.”
We walked into the office area. Old Zhao raised an eyebrow when he saw the two of us come in together, but said nothing.
I walked up to the whiteboard and redrew Hongyun’s shareholding penetration diagram from scratch.
Four layers. Liu Jianguo at the very top. Three layers of nominee companies below.
“Wen Ruzhou, from which direction do you think we should investigate the innermost node?”
She walked up to the whiteboard and looked at it for a moment.
“Not from ownership,” she said.
“From where then?”
“From that vanished money.” She pointed at the third capital flow line on the whiteboard. “This money vanished after leaving the personal account, right? But what if it didn’t vanish, but instead reached a place we can’t see—”
“What do you mean?”
“What if the recipient isn’t a domestic account?”
I looked at her.
“Cross-border transfer?”
“Not an ordinary cross-border transfer,” she said. “I did a special audit on cross-border capital flows back at the Audit Office. There’s a method—mirror transactions through underground banks. Money goes out domestically and comes in overseas, completed simultaneously on both sides without leaving any record of cross-border wire transfers in the banking system.”
“How do you know Hongyun used this method?”
“I don’t,” she said frankly. “But if this money vanished domestically, and among Hongyun’s affiliated companies there happens to be an import-export trade business—”
“Shunda Trading.”
“Right. Shunda Trading has import-export qualifications. If it was used as a channel—”
“—funds could leave under the guise of trade,” I picked up her sentence.
We locked eyes for a second.
Then I turned around and added a line on the whiteboard—from Hongyun’s capital pool to Shunda Trading, then a dotted line pointing toward a question mark.
“This is the third line,” I said.
“Mm.”
“But everything you’ve said is still speculation.”
“I know.”
“Speculation needs evidence before it can turn into a lead.”
“Which is why I need to see Shunda Trading’s financial data.”
“You can’t see it right now.”
“Why?”
“Because Shunda Trading is located in an industrial park on the outskirts of the city,” I picked up the car keys on the desk. “We need to make a trip there.”
Her eyes lit up—not with excitement, but with that light of “we can finally move.”
“When?”
“Now.”
It was two in the afternoon when we arrived at Shunda Trading.
The industrial park was very quiet. Most of the factory buildings were operating normally, but Shunda Trading’s heavy iron gate was closed. A faded sign hung by the entrance, its characters no longer legible.
I didn’t step up to knock directly.
“Wait a second.” I parked the car by the roadside and turned off the engine.
“Not going in?” Wen Ruzhou asked.
“Look at the gate.”
She followed my gaze over.
Beside the iron gate was a guard booth with a man sitting inside. Not a security guard—he was wearing work overalls with grease stains on his hands. Looked like he had just come out of a workshop.
A factory with its gates closed, leaving a workshop worker at the door to guard it.
“This factory,” I said, “doesn’t look like it’s operating normally.”
“Then what is it doing?”
“Don’t know. But we can’t alert the snake now.” I rolled down the car window a crack. “You wait in the car first; I’ll go down and take a look.”
“I’ll go too.”
“If you go, it’s easy to blow our cover.”
“I won’t blow our cover,” she said. “I did three years of on-site audits at the Audit Office; going into factories to inspect accounts was routine. I have a way to make them open the gate.”
“What way?”
“I was transferred from the Audit Office,” she smiled faintly. “I just need to make them think I’m here to audit their taxes.”
I looked at her for two seconds.
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
“What if they get suspicious?”
“Then you can come out and rescue me, Captain.”
I didn’t speak.
“Captain Shen,” she turned her head to look at me, “you can’t keep me in the car every time. If this case is going to move forward, I need to be on-site.”
She was right.
In economic crime investigations, the lead officer cannot protect their partner behind them forever. She needed to collide with things, try things, and make mistakes herself.
“I’m giving you ten minutes,” I checked my watch. “After ten minutes, no matter what you find out, come out. If you haven’t come out within ten minutes—”
“—you come in and find me.”
“Mm.”
“Alright.”
She pushed open the car door and stepped out.
I watched her through the rearview mirror—she adjusted her clothes, shifted how her canvas bag was slung, and then walked toward the guard booth. Her walking posture was completely different from a moment ago. In the car, Wen Ruzhou had been relaxed, but now—
Her shoulders were held slightly square, her chin lifted a bit, and a perfectly measured smile hung on the corners of her lips.
It wasn’t that “smiling Buddha” grin from earlier; it was an “official business” smile.
She was playing a role.
A tax auditor inspecting the books.
The worker in the guard booth saw her walking over, stood up, and shouted across the iron gate: “Who are you looking for?”
“Hello,” her voice filtered through the car window, somewhat muffled, but I caught the change in her tone—half a beat slower than usual, carrying a distinct sense of distance. “I’m from the Municipal Tax Bureau Inspection Bureau, here to verify your company’s value-added tax declaration for last quarter. Is the person in charge here?”
Taxation.
She didn’t say Audit Office; she said Tax Bureau.
Smart.
The Audit Office’s deterrent power only worked on large enterprises; for a small factory on the city outskirts, people might not even know what the Audit Office was. But the Tax Bureau—anyone who had ever run a company was afraid of the Tax Bureau.
The worker in the guard booth hesitated for a moment before picking up a phone to make a call. After saying a few words, he walked back and opened a crack in the iron gate.
“Come on in. Our Manager Wang is on the second floor.”
“Thank you.”
She walked inside.
The iron gate closed behind her.
I checked my watch.
2:04 PM.
Nine minutes.
She came out at 2:13 PM.
Three minutes earlier than my stipulated time.
As she walked over, she held a piece of paper in her hand. That smile was still on her face, but the light in her eyes was twice as bright as before she went in.
I rolled down the car window.
She leaned down and handed the paper in through the window.
“Take a look.”
I took it.
It was a handwritten business card—not Shunda Trading’s business card, but a personal one. It read:
Wang Fang General Manager, Shunda Trading Phone: 138XXXXXXXX
Below was the company address and an email.
“You met Wang Fang?”
“No. But I met Manager Wang.” She retrieved the photocopy of the business card—that paper was a photocopy—from the window and looked at it. “Shunda’s manager is named Wang, but he isn’t named Wang Fang; he’s named Wang Defu. In his fifties, been working at Shunda for over a decade.”
“Then where did you get this business card?”
“On Manager Wang’s office desk,” she said. “When I went in, he was taking a phone call and asked me to wait. While waiting for him to finish the call, I browsed through the things on his desk.”
“You flipped through someone else’s desk?”
“I didn’t flip,” she corrected me. “His desk was right in front of me; I merely took a look.”
“Took a look at a business card.”
“Took a look at a business card and an express shipping slip.”
“Shipping slip?”
“Mm.” She pulled another piece of paper from her pocket—this time not a photocopy, but her own handwritten notes. “SF Express, sender is Shunda Trading, recipient is Shenzhen Huacheng Trading Co., Ltd. Shipping date was last Thursday, contents written as ‘contract documents’.”
Huacheng Trading.
In the Dingsheng case, the source account for Zhou Jianguo’s money was Huacheng Trading.
Now, a half-dead factory on the city outskirts was also sending items to Huacheng Trading in Shenzhen.
“Are you sure you saw it clearly?” I asked.
“Clearly. I even copied down the SF Express tracking number.”
I fell silent for a few seconds.
“What else did you see?”
“After Manager Wang finished his call, I chatted with him for a bit,” she said. “I said I was there to audit taxes, and he got very nervous—the kind of nervousness that didn’t look like dodging a routine tax inspection, but like he was terrified something specific would be uncovered. I asked if Shunda had any large-value capital transactions recently, and he said ‘all normal business.’ But I noticed that when he said this, he glanced at the phone on his desk.”
“Was there a message on the phone?”
“I can’t be sure. But his action of looking at the phone was very deliberate—it wasn’t a casual check, but the kind of action where ‘someone sent a message and I need to confirm it’.”
“Did you see the message content?”
“No. But I saw the sender’s contact remark.”
“What name?”
“‘President Liu.'”
President Liu.
The legal representative of Hongyun Investment was named Liu Jianguo.
The manager of Shunda Trading was looking at a message sent by the legal representative of Hongyun.
I put away both the business card and the shipping tracking number.
“Get in the car.”
She walked around to the passenger side, opened the door, and sat inside.
“Captain Shen,” she said while pulling on her seatbelt, “did you know long ago that Shunda had issues?”
“What do you think?”
“You coming today wasn’t to check Hongyun’s office address,” she turned her head. “You came to check Shunda.”
I didn’t answer and started the car.
“There was nothing useful in Hongyun’s office,” I said as I drove. “Everything that should be cleared out was cleared out. But Shunda is different—it’s a node that’s still operating.”
“What kind of node?”
“Hongyun collects the money, Shunda transfers the money. Two lines, one closed loop.”
She was quiet for a few seconds.
“So you having me come with you wasn’t because you thought I was useful.”
“Wasn’t because.”
“Then why?”
“Because this line requires someone to look at it with me,” I said. “Old Zhao is getting old; his eyes can’t keep up. Little Liu runs fast but thinks slowly. The others—”
I paused briefly.
“—I don’t trust the others.”
She didn’t speak.
But from the corner of my eye, I saw her smile slightly.
It wasn’t that “smiling Buddha” grin. It was a very subtle smile with the corners of her mouth curling up just a fraction.
Like having hit upon something she wasn’t supposed to say.
It was almost four o’clock by the time we returned to the detachment.
I handed the business card and shipping tracking number to Old Zhao, asking him to check Wang Fang’s background and the tracking history for that SF Express number.
“Also,” I added, “check Shunda Trading’s import and export records over the past year. If there are large capital transactions under trade accounts, flag them.”
“Understood.” Old Zhao took the items and left.
Only Wen Ruzhou and I remained in the office.
She sat in the chair opposite me, restructuring the process of today’s visit to Shunda.
“Captain Shen, I have a question.”
“Speak.”
“Who is Wang Fang?”
“I’m checking.”
“I mean—what is Wang Fang’s status at Shunda Trading? The business card says General Manager, but she isn’t Shunda’s legal representative.”
“The legal representative is Zhang Deming.”
“Who is Zhang Deming?”
“The nephew of Liu Jianguo, the legal representative of Hongyun.”
She fell silent for two seconds.
“Liu Jianguo’s nephew manages a company affiliated with Hongyun,” she said slowly. “The company’s business card bears another woman’s name. This woman isn’t the legal representative or a shareholder, yet her presence in the company is larger than the legal representative’s.”
“Did you find something out?”
“The gatekeeper called her ‘President Wang’,” she said. “A person who is neither a legal representative nor a shareholder is called ‘President Wang’.”
I looked at her.
“Have you seen this kind of structure at the Audit Office?”
“I have.” She thought for a moment. “Usually, it’s one of two scenarios. First, Wang Fang is the actual investor, and Zhang Deming is merely a nominee legal representative. Second—”
She paused.
“—second, Wang Fang is the person behind Zhang Deming. Not a nominee, but the true controller. The difference between a nominee legal representative and a controller is—a nominee doesn’t know they are a nominee, but a controller knows.”
“How do you judge which one Wang Fang is?”
“By whether she has ever appeared,” she said. “If Wang Fang is a nominee, she doesn’t need to appear on any occasion—because her name was simply borrowed. But if she is the controller, she must have appeared at certain crucial moments. Like today—the gatekeeper called her ‘President Wang’, indicating she has a physical presence before the employees.”
“But Wang Defu—that Manager Wang—when he saw the name on the business card, it was Wang Fang,” I said, “not himself.”
“Right. So there are two possibilities.” She held up two fingers. “First, the business card is old; Wang Fang was previously Shunda’s General Manager, and although the person changed later, the business cards weren’t updated. Second—”
“Second?”
“Second, Wang Fang has never left Shunda.”
I didn’t speak.
She didn’t continue either.
Because we both knew—if Wang Fang had never left Shunda, then her name appearing in a company belonging to Liu Jianguo’s nephew was no longer a simple matter of being “affiliated.”
This was a family connection.
Or, more accurately—this was a key node on the capital chain extending from Hongyun to Shunda, and on to Huacheng Trading.
“Captain Shen,” Wen Ruzhou stood up, “I’ll go back first and organize today’s findings.”
“Mm.”
As she reached the door, she looked back at me.
“Captain Shen, regarding today—thank you for letting me go with you.”
“No need to thank me,” I said. “You’re not a vase.”
Her smile faltered briefly.
Then she said: “Captain Shen, today was also the first time you looked at me properly.”
I didn’t answer.
The door closed.
Sitting at my desk, I looked at Hongyun’s shareholding penetration diagram on the whiteboard once more.
Then, beside Shunda Trading, I added a name:
Wang Fang.
Beside it, I added another dotted line pointing to:
Huacheng Trading.
In the middle of the dotted line, I wrote a question mark.
If this line connected—
Hongyun → Shunda → Huacheng Trading → Zhou Jianguo → Dingsheng Case.
From illegal fund-raising to a fifteen-year-old cold case.
From two hundred million yuan in black money to an intermediary who served five years in prison.
Two cases, one single chain.
I leaned back against the chair and closed my eyes.
Sky outside had darkened. June dusk came late, but the night was bound to fall anyway.
My phone screen lit up with a message from Wen Ruzhou.
“Captain Shen, I’ve organized today’s findings and sent them to your email. Also—I checked the name Wang Fang and couldn’t find her in the shareholder list of Shenzhen Huacheng Trading. But I found a name in Shunda Trading’s commercial registration change records from last year—”
“Who?”
“Lin Meihua.”
Lin Meihua.
The legal representative of Huacheng Trading.
Last year, she changed her role to supervisor of Shunda Trading.
I set the phone down.
This chain—
Was now connected.