When you eliminate every other possibility, what remains before you must be the correct answer.
Looking at the list of deceased patients, Shu Yu had actually reached the same conclusion as Forensic Examiner Tan.
“If he really did this, then what was his motive?” Feng Tang still found it difficult to connect this person to Hong Guodong. “What grudge did he have against Hong Guodong?”
“If the DNA matches, we can just ask him directly,” Team Leader Liang said. “Once we have the ironclad evidence of a DNA match, he’ll have no reason to keep hiding anything.”
Feng Tang thought about it and agreed.
Team Leader Liang and Forensic Examiner Tan each went off to make preparations. Meanwhile, like Feng Tang, Shu Yu was trying to guess why Han Ya’s older brother would have attacked Hong Guodong if his DNA really did match.
“There must be some connection between Yan Yu and Han Ya. Let me see if I can find it.” After thinking for a while, Lu Anran decided to start with Yan Yu.
“If Yan Yu weren’t in such a bad state that he can’t be questioned right now, asking him would probably be the fastest way,” Xiao Que said as he leaned back in his chair. “I have a feeling Han Ya contracted HIV from Yan Yu.”
“Then the person he should want revenge on is Yan Yu. It still has nothing to do with Hong Guodong,” Lu Anran countered without even looking up.
Xiao Que fell silent, because he couldn’t figure out the connection either.
Han Ya’s older brother, Han Yu, was twenty-seven years old and worked as a courier.
When Team Leader Liang brought him to the special investigation team, Shu Yu couldn’t see even the slightest trace of nervousness in his eyes.
If anything, that only confirmed that he really was connected to the case. An ordinary person suddenly taken away by the police couldn’t possibly remain this calm.
Shu Yu watched as he walked down the corridor toward the interrogation room. Forensic Examiner Tan had already taken an evidence bag to run the DNA comparison.
“Looking at him, it doesn’t seem like he plans to deny anything.” Lu Anran pushed up her glasses. “I don’t know why, but he gives me the feeling that he has nothing left to lose.”
“That’s a very accurate description.” Xiao Que felt the same way. “Now all we have to do is wait for Team Leader Liang to give us the final answer.”
At this point in the case, all they really lacked was a final conclusion so they could write the official case statement.
“I’m actually thinking about something else,” Shu Yu suddenly said. “Even if Yan Yu changes his testimony, there still isn’t any evidence proving that everything he did before was at Yan Xue’s instigation.”
“Huh?” Feng Tang was clearly taken aback. Then, after thinking carefully about it, she realized Shu Yu was right. “If Yan Yu doesn’t have any recordings or written evidence proving that Yan Xue really did incite him, then there really doesn’t seem to be any basis for saying she had anything to do with it.”
“So I’m guessing the police won’t continue looking for Yan Xue after this,” Shu Yu said.
After all, under the current law, Yan Xue had to be presumed innocent in the absence of evidence.
“I really didn’t expect her to walk away from this case completely unscathed.” Lu Anran returned to her computer. “But maybe she planned for that from the very beginning.”
No one knew exactly how Yan Xue had convinced Yan Yu to participate in a plan like this.
“I’m really looking forward to the moment when the truth finally comes out.” Feng Tang hovered by the doorway. “Because that means we can get off work!”
Those beautiful words, get off work, instantly struck a chord with everyone present—including Chen Heng, who had worked overtime for several days and had practically been on call twenty-four hours a day.
“Hopefully we get a slightly longer break this time.” Shu Yu remembered Shu Ling’s invitation. “Shu Ling said that once this is over, she’ll invite me to Hengdian.”
“Can I come with you?” Feng Tang’s eyes immediately lit up.
“You’re not planning to go there to meet a few directors, are you?” Shu Yu looked at Feng Tang uncertainly. “Be realistic. You don’t have the time to stay on a film set long-term.”
“I’m not expecting anything like that.” Feng Tang knew perfectly well what kind of job she had. “I just heard you can see lots of celebrities there!”
“Whose autograph do you want?” Lu Anran immediately started gossiping. “That award-winning actor filming with Shu Ling?”
“I actually do quite like him.” Feng Tang suddenly became reserved. “Fu Chongming is one of the few male actors in the entertainment industry I’m interested in.”
“But he lies about his height.” Shu Yu remembered the gossip she had heard from Shu Ling. “He’s only 179 centimeters tall, and he isn’t as handsome in person as he looks in retouched photos.”
“Shu Ling told you that?” Feng Tang’s face was filled with disbelief.
Shu Yu looked at her speechlessly.
“Who else? I’ve never even met him in person.”
Feng Tang immediately felt somewhat disillusioned, but the thought of being able to follow Shu Yu and meet him in person still left her looking forward to it.
And just like that, she reserved herself a place on Shu Yu’s trip.
Lu Anran and Xiao Que had no interest whatsoever. They would rather use their vacation to catch up on sleep.
An hour later, Forensic Examiner Tan came over and told them the result.
“The DNA matched. It’s Han Yu.” Forensic Examiner Tan pointed to the test report in her hand. “Let’s go over to the interrogation room together. I also want to know what exactly happened in this case.”
Everyone, overwhelmed by curiosity, left the meeting room together and headed toward the interrogation room.
When Forensic Examiner Tan delivered the report, Han Yu’s expression remained calm, as though he had already expected the result.
“Judging by your expression, you already guessed what the result would be, didn’t you?” Team Leader Liang asked.
“That’s right. But before I saw this report, I didn’t want to say anything.” Han Yu had no intention of continuing to deny it. “Now that the evidence is conclusive, I’ll tell you everything I should tell you.”
Team Leader Liang looked at Han Yu with complicated emotions.
“I have a younger sister named Han Ya. I assume you already know that.” Han Yu closed his eyes, looking utterly exhausted. “She left me forever more than two months ago because of complications from AIDS.”
“A lung infection. We know.” Team Leader Liang waited for him to continue.
“Han Ya was Yan Yu’s girlfriend.”
With that single sentence, Han Yu cleared up all of Shu Yu and the others’ doubts.
“Yan Yu was the one who infected Han Ya with HIV?”
That was also one of the possibilities they had already guessed.
“That’s right. My sister was a student in the five-year program at C City Vocational and Technical College. She was only seventeen when she met Yan Yu.” Han Yu closed his eyes in pain. “It was her first relationship. Her grades had never been good since she was little, but she was introverted and well-behaved. I never thought she would sleep with Yan Yu after meeting him.”
Shu Yu was somewhat confused.
Among the people they had previously seen who had been infected by Yan Yu, Han Ya had never been mentioned.
“Less than three months after they started dating, my sister began feeling unwell. I took her to the hospital for tests, and the doctor told me my sister had AIDS!” Han Yu opened his eyes, his face filled with anger. “Only then did my sister tell me that she was dating Yan Yu. I immediately went to Yan Yu’s house and made him go get tested in front of his entire family.”
“Unsurprisingly, he had already been infected.” Han Yu’s expression gradually calmed. “And that was when my sister found out that Yan Yu swung both ways. He was also sleeping around with men behind her back!”
Outside the interrogation room, Shu Yu and the others were dumbfounded.
“After that, I went to the school and demanded that they deal with the matter seriously. But that old bastard Hong Guodong suppressed the whole thing. I only found out later that Yan Yu’s parents had stuffed a full hundred thousand yuan into his hands to make the problem disappear so their precious son wouldn’t be expelled.”
Han Yu’s face was full of mockery.
Now the entire truth had finally come out.
“So that’s why Han Yu wanted to kill Hong Guodong.” Feng Tang suddenly understood. “And it was precisely because Hong Guodong suppressed the matter that Yan Yu became even worse. Otherwise, those other three people wouldn’t have been infected at all.”
“Exactly.” Lu Anran was equally emotional.
Sure enough, Han Yu went on to explain their motive for murder.
“Yan Yu’s parents couldn’t control that useless son of theirs at all. After what happened to my sister forced her to drop out, he went on to harm three more people—two men and one woman.” Han Yu’s face was full of contempt. “My sister died in March. Those three came to me and told me they wanted revenge.”
Team Leader Liang frowned.
“They contacted you first?”
“That’s right. I don’t know how they found out that my sister had died, and I don’t know how they got my contact information either.” Han Yu pointed at his phone, which had been confiscated and placed to one side. “I don’t have a habit of deleting chat histories. The messages from when they first contacted me are still on there.”
“After that, you planned to kill Hong Guodong and frame Yan Yu?” Team Leader Liang asked.
“What happened afterward wasn’t part of our plan. At the time, all we wanted was to kill Hong Guodong,” Han Yu said. “They told me that once Hong Guodong died, the police would definitely think Yan Yu did it. Then someone would release all of Yan Yu’s personal information and get him cyberbullied.”
“Just cyberbullying?” Team Leader Liang found that difficult to believe.
“That’s right. Just cyberbullying.” Han Yu looked completely serious. “Someone like him deserves to be despised by everyone. He has AIDS anyway, so he won’t live much longer. Killing him myself would only dirty my hands!”
Team Leader Liang reluctantly accepted that explanation.
Afterward, he asked Han Yu about the details of the crime.
“We all knew Hong Guodong liked taking the alley behind the school on his way home from work, so we waited for him there that day,” Han Yu said. “When we saw him, the four of us restrained him. Before he died, we wanted him to experience the fear of being infected with HIV.”
“But you don’t have HIV,” Team Leader Liang said, puzzled. “Doing that would only put you at risk of becoming infected.”
“It wouldn’t. I went first.” Han Yu suddenly smiled. “Besides, I was taking revenge for my sister.”
Listening outside the interrogation room, Shu Yu was speechless.
“Well, I didn’t expect him to be so safety-conscious,” Feng Tang muttered weakly.
“After we made him experience fear and pain, Huang Xia strangled him to death.” Han Yu seemed almost relieved. “After we killed him, we weren’t afraid at all. Really.”
Only then did Shu Yu realize something was wrong.
“Something doesn’t add up. They wanted to kill Hong Guodong just because he protected Yan Yu? Isn’t that way too impulsive?” Shu Yu looked at Han Yu inside the interrogation room. “And for the other HIV patients, killing Hong Guodong might have helped vent their anger, but why did they bring Han Yu into it?”
“I think it’s strange too.” Xiao Que had already been preparing to draft the official statement, but even he felt that Han Yu’s explanation didn’t hold up. “Both Han Yu and the other three are acting far too impulsively. And Han Yu’s explanation for why he sexually assaulted Hong Guodong doesn’t make sense at all.”
The reason was simply too bizarre.
Shu Yu wasn’t the only one who thought so.
Team Leader Liang, who came out of the interrogation room, felt the same way.
“They definitely killed him, and there’s nothing inconsistent about how the crime was carried out.” Team Leader Liang looked thoroughly puzzled. “But their motive is far too abnormal.”
“I suspect someone guided them into doing this.” Shu Yu suddenly remembered Yang Jie from the previous case. “Have you checked those three people’s chat histories?”
“Not yet. They confessed immediately, so we haven’t conducted any supplementary investigation into them.” Team Leader Liang was still holding Han Yu’s phone. “You suspect there’s another mastermind behind this case?”
“Maybe ‘mastermind’ isn’t quite the right word.” Shu Yu didn’t know how to describe it. “How about this? If their phones contain what we’re looking for, you’ll understand once you see it.”
Team Leader Liang also wanted to understand what exactly was going on, so he called over a technical police officer and had them compile the chat histories of all four suspects from the time they became infected until now.
“Wait. What kind of group is this?”
Shu Yu immediately spotted that the three of them and Han Ya had all joined a group called “HIV Patients Support Group” in early March.
“It’s a WeChat group. There aren’t many people in it.” Lu Anran helped project the chat history onto the screen. “But the group is pretty active. There have been more than ten thousand messages from March until now.”
As they went through page after page of chat records, the expressions of everyone present became increasingly grave.
“This person with the black-stone profile picture, along with several other accounts, kept aggressively brainwashing them into believing they would die very soon after contracting HIV—and that they would die horribly,” Xiao Que said. He was the fastest reader among them, so he summarized what he had found.
“It’s more than that. They were actively harming people!” Shu Yu said. “Look. In mid-March, after Han Ya’s condition suddenly worsened, these people told them that Han Ya had become sick because she was taking medication. Han Ya believed them and stopped taking her medicine. That caused her immune system to completely collapse, making her symptoms continue to worsen.”
“After Han Ya died, Huang Xia and the other two became even more terrified.”
The chat records clearly showed them worrying every day that they might suddenly die just like Han Ya.
“The other side didn’t try to comfort them at all. Instead, they took the opportunity to deepen their fear of death.”
Their extreme fear of death caused their hatred toward Hong Guodong to gradually intensify. Under the other side’s guidance, that resentment slowly transformed into murderous intent.
A criminal psychology expert whom Team Leader Liang had called over from the neighboring office building read through the chat records before saying, “The people behind this are professionals. They subtly guided and brainwashed these young people, who were already terrified because they believed they had an incurable disease. Step by step, they pushed them from fear to despair, and then from despair to hatred and the desire for revenge.”
He pointed at several of the messages.
“Ordinary people wouldn’t know how to use language this strongly suggestive and manipulative. They clearly understand psychology—and I don’t mean the pop psychology you find at roadside stalls. This is genuine professional knowledge.”
“The IP addresses for these accounts are all overseas, aren’t they?” Shu Yu looked at Lu Anran.
Lu Anran and the cyber police officer both wore helpless expressions.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve encountered something like this?” Team Leader Liang asked in surprise after seeing Shu Yu’s expression.
“The last case was the same.” Shu Yu sighed. “And they weren’t fake IP addresses that could be created just by using a VPN. The cybersecurity side helped us trace them in detail. They were genuine IP addresses from Africa and South America.”
That meant it would be extremely difficult to trace them any further.
Just like many online scammers who were difficult to apprehend, these people weren’t merely overseas—they were operating from some of the most chaotic regions abroad.
“Look. Anonymous accounts gave the three of them Han Yu’s contact information.” Feng Tang was still going through the chat records. “And they guaranteed that Yan Yu would be cyberbullied until he killed himself.”
“These people must have prepared everything long ago.” Shu Yu remembered that Yang Jie’s personal information had also been mass-distributed more than a week before her incident. “Yan Yu’s personal information and Yan Xue’s cooperation must have been part of their plan from the beginning. Yan Xue already hated her younger brother, Yan Yu, so she wouldn’t have refused.”
“Then what exactly is their goal?” Team Leader Liang became more confused the more he listened.
“Their ultimate target is us.”
Shu Yu stared at the chat records that had been scrolled all the way to the end.
If Yang Jie’s case had merely made her feel as though there was an unseen hand pushing events from behind the scenes, then what had happened with Hong Guodong and Yan Yu made her absolutely certain that the other side’s target was their Public Opinion Response Division.
Especially what had happened that morning, when Yan Yu had intended to jump from the building. If Shu Yu had realized what was happening even a little later, the consequences would have been unimaginable.
It would have triggered a massive wave of public-opinion attacks against the police, far more severe than anything that had come before.
The police incited cyberbullying that drove an innocent member of the public to suicide.
Shu Yu didn’t even dare imagine how terrible the consequences of that would be.
They had pushed Han Yu and the other three into killing Hong Guodong because only if Hong Guodong—the man who had expelled Yan Yu—was murdered would the police turn their attention toward Yan Yu, who had a grudge against him.
That was why they had deliberately guided public opinion toward the claim that Hong Guodong had sexually assaulted female students in the beginning. Their goal was to force Shu Yu and the others to use Hong Guodong’s cause of death to refute the rumors surrounding the case.
After that, under Yan Xue’s guidance, Yan Yu started a livestream.
Shu Yu guessed that Yan Xue had probably persuaded Yan Yu by telling him that if he did this, he could make a huge amount of money, live freely and comfortably from then on, and even become an influencer.
After Yan Yu took the bait, Yan Xue deliberately had him accuse the police of protecting Hong Guodong.
But Yan Xue herself knew perfectly well that Hong Guodong had never done such a thing.
So it wasn’t that the other side didn’t understand how the government system worked.
They had deliberately needed to choose a date for which Hong Guodong had ironclad proof of his whereabouts.
And that date completely turned Yan Yu into the center of the cyberbullying storm.
Although they didn’t know exactly what Yan Xue had said to Yan Yu, Yan Yu had probably only realized at that point that he had been used as someone else’s weapon.
Yan Xue gained the attention and profits Yan Yu brought her, then left the city for good.