That day, the chatty girl who had wrapped herself up like a bear in the malatang shop seemed to have died in that bathhouse prison.
When she appeared again, she was the young miss standing here.
A young miss carried a young miss’s air; even her greeting had a few points of high-handed superiority.
Zhen Wuyu: “Just a coincidence?”
Su Li raised her brows. “Then what, you think it’s fate?”
Zhen Wuyu didn’t pick up her half-smiling, teasing bait. He walked over to Qi Xuan. “Why run? So scared?”
In terms of grades, Qi Xuan was actually even better than Xu Zhicheng, but he seemed more naive. With fear on his face, he muttered, “My mom is dead. A lot of people say she gambled and owed money and offended someone. I’m afraid some creditors will come for me, so now I’m scared of anyone I see, that’s why I ran. Who are you?”
“This is a society under rule of law. Don’t mess around.”
“I don’t have money either.”
He backed up to the wall, taking a defensive posture, his backpack held in front of him as a shield.
Put that way, Su Li, who had two black-clad bodyguards with her, looked even more like an evil villain.
Su Li turned back and looked at the two bodyguards.
“Talking about you two. I told you to change clothes… if you’d changed into red-and-green floral padded jackets, would this little brother even misunderstand?”
The two bodyguards were speechless. One of them argued, “Miss, he seems to have run because he was being chased by this officer. Not because of us.”
Su Li turned back toward Zhen Wuyu. “Did you hear that? They’re talking about you.”
This lunatic.
Zhen Wuyu held down a mouthful of frustration and ignored her. He took out his credentials and was about to take Qi Xuan away.
Qi Xuan avoided him a little and stared at Zhen Wuyu. “You’re police? Have you found the killer who murdered my mom?”
Zhen Wuyu: “We’re investigating. I need to ask you some things. We’ll talk at the station.”
Qi Xuan: “I’ve told everything I can. I’ve been studying this whole time. What can I help you investigate? But I want to know, those three just now clearly came to block me. How did they know where I was, or were they following you, this police officer? Could they be related to my mom’s case?”
This kid… shifting the blame.
Zhen Wuyu glanced at Su Li and said, “She’s a victim in another case and also needs to cooperate with the investigation, but there are other arrangements. What concerns you is your mom’s case. Is there something inconvenient for you, why you won’t come with me to the station?”
Qi Xuan’s right hand clenched on the backpack strap.
Su Li: “Let me explain. I came to Baimu Town to burn incense and pay respects to my birth mother.”
“I’d already bought the offerings and incense. Then I got caught. I finally got out, so I have to go to the temple to burn incense…”
Qi Xuan sharply pointed out her flaw. “This isn’t the road to the temple.”
Su Li: “I know. So I came to find you before going to the temple.”
Qi Xuan choked; Zhen Wuyu frowned.
“Because.”
“I’m mourning my mother, and you killed your mother.”
“I really wanted to see a ‘talent’ like you.”
Other than her, everyone present was shocked by what she said.
But Zhen Wuyu’s reaction was surprise at her: she knew?
Qi Xuan’s expression turned like a palette: shock, then anger and twisted rage, then disbelief.
“What nonsense are you talking about?!”
Su Li just smiled and looked at Zhen Wuyu. “Am I talking nonsense? Then treat it as nonsense. Anyway, I’m not police. You are.”
“Then Classmate Zhen, tell me, am I right?”
Zhen Wuyu didn’t want to talk with her, or ask how she knew Qi Xuan was the killer. He asked Qi Xuan directly.
“You can swim, and you’re very good in the water?”
Qi Xuan thought of teachers at school and some childhood records. “I learned when I was little. I think I even competed before. But kids like going into water to play, it doesn’t mean anything. After middle school I barely swam. I probably can’t last long now.”
Zhen Wuyu: “You have injuries? You dress very conservatively.”
Qi Xuan’s eye twitched. “Injuries? Maybe in PE I bump into things. Before, I also had conflicts with some hooligans outside school. It left a few scars. What’s strange about that?”
Zhen Wuyu: “Not from your mom hitting you?”
Qi Xuan: “How could it be?! She was very good to me. Wait, are you suspecting my injuries were from my mom hitting me, thinking I held a grudge, so you suspect I hated her and then killed her?”
Zhen Wuyu: “March 15. Where were you all day?”
Qi Xuan: “I already said. You police already took my statement. That day was Sunday. My mom didn’t come pick me up. I was studying at school. Lots of classmates saw me in the study room. They also gave statements.”
Zhen Wuyu: “I know. I’ve read the statements, and I’ve seen the study room cameras. You went in and out many times.”
Qi Xuan: “A lot to read.”
Zhen Wuyu: “Between twelve and one-thirty, you weren’t on camera for an hour and a half.”
Qi Xuan: “I went to eat then. I didn’t go to the cafeteria. I brought a lunchbox from home.”
Zhen Wuyu: “I know the last shot at twelve. You did leave the study room with a lunchbox.”
Qi Xuan: “So what? You suspect I carried a lunchbox to the riverbank to kill my mom? This place isn’t far from where she was murdered. How would I get there? You think I’m a marathon runner?”
The teenager’s sarcasm was obvious.
Zhen Wuyu: “You didn’t need to go there, because she would drive to pick you up.”
Qi Xuan froze.
Zhen Wuyu stood there, cold, his gaze sharp. “Every time she came to Baimu Town she drove, and she would pick you up. That wasn’t because she cared about you that much. It was because you can drive, and after every time she gambled she liked to drink, so she needed someone to drive. That person was you.”
“According to the teachers, your mom often came to pick you up, but she rarely went to the front gate. That’s because she was a gambler and often had money disputes with people. She was afraid of running into other gamblers at the school gate and causing trouble. So she picked you up at the back gate.”
“On March 15 at noon, twelve o’clock, she drove to the back gate to pick you up. But right there at the back gate, you had already drugged her unconscious.”
Qi Xuan cut in. “If I remember right, before, you police told me about my mom’s death. You said she drove out of Baimu Town and was killed in the wild on the way back to my home. Why are you now saying she was drugged unconscious midway? Didn’t the police say town cameras showed her driving through the lane then… was I in the car? Let me ask you: was I there? Was I the one driving?”
Zhen Wuyu had already taken out his phone and opened the traffic surveillance video.
“It was your mom.”
“But your mom was also you.”
Su Li glanced at it. At this moment she no longer had that refined young-miss restraint. When she spoke, she carried that chatty, nasty tone, like she was repeatedly cursing people.
Zhen Wuyu shot her a disgusted look.
Qi Xuan watched the blurry driving image of the red-clothed woman in the footage. Seeing the empty front passenger seat and empty back seat, he was about to curse them for trying to fool him.
Zhen Wuyu: “Dressing as a woman, is that hard? The covert footage can’t fully capture a person’s face. With your height and build, a wig and clothes are enough to imitate how your mom looks driving. As for your mom, she was in the trunk.”
“There wasn’t much in the trunk, but there were marks of something heavy pressing on it. The only missing item was the flotation board. You later used that board to bind her body and drag it across the river.”
“Before crossing the river, you staged the scene to make it look like she was killed on that stretch of road.”
Qi Xuan’s expression tightened, then he calmed down. “This is ridiculous. It’s like you’re forcing logic just to convict me. You think you’re filming Sherlock Holmes? Where’s the evidence?”
“Did you find my mom’s hair or DNA material in the trunk?”
“Or did you find my hair or DNA material on the driver’s seat?”
“There’s no evidence at all. Just theory and guesses. This is what you police are capable of? Oh, I heard you’re an expert from the provincial department.”
“So that’s it.”
Even the two bodyguards could tell this high school student was not ordinary.
The smile, strange. The eyes, cold.
His words were sharp and hit the key points.
For a moment, he even had the bearing to spar with Zhen Wuyu, the provincial department genius with countless awards and honors.
But Zhen Wuyu was no different from before, still wearing that dead-coffin face, calm and cold as he looked at Qi Xuan.
“She had serious money problems. The hair dye she used was low quality. You can say her shed hair was cleaned up by you, and the trunk didn’t have a strand. But when she was hidden in the trunk, her hair rubbed against bags and other things. Wouldn’t that leave even a tiny bit of dye residue?”
“Also, you seem to have forgotten one thing: you didn’t eat lunch that day.”
“The lunchbox was hidden in the glove compartment of the front passenger seat. With the car moving, oil and food residue leaked a bit. Those things seep. Even if you wiped it, there would still be residue. After testing, we can determine its time point through oxidation reaction time, and even analyze the type of food.”
“Tell me. Why would your lunchbox appear in your mom’s car?”
“If you never met her, never got in the car.”
“Before this, the lab results were already out. Think carefully about how you’ll answer these interrogation questions.”
Qi Xuan’s face turned bluish. His lips went paler. He had none of the cold smile and sarcasm from just now, but he still narrowed his long eyes and said slowly, “Then tell me, how did I get back to school after that? Drive back? I didn’t have a car for the return trip.”
“Time-wise, the conditions to commit the crime can’t be met.”
Zhen Wuyu: “Very simple. The person who returned to the study room at one-thirty wasn’t you. You found a student who looks a lot like you and had him pretend to be you and pass the cameras quickly. Earlier, you passed by repeatedly. Some shots caught a face, some didn’t. When we checked later, we subconsciously assumed this person was still you. That’s inertia thinking and overlapping impressions.”
Qi Xuan: “…..”
“I’ll say it again. Where’s the evidence?”
Zhen Wuyu: “The person who came back at two-thirty was you. But by then you’d crossed the river. Of course you couldn’t wear the original clothes. So you wore a complete, identical set of new clothes. In theory you prepared three sets of identical outfits. There was no time to swap clothes with that student. And your mom gave you very little living money. You bought your clothes at the same cheap stall. Buying three sets at once, the vendor remembers and there are records. More importantly: the student you recruited on campus, I already asked your subject teacher to announce it to the whole school and call him out. If he comes forward now, we won’t pursue responsibility. Tell me, will he come out?”
“You think police only quietly look for clues? Sometimes public power is a good thing. Not everyone is as bold as you and can keep it hidden. And you don’t have much money. A student you bribed with small favors, how much courage does he really have?”
There were so many cases. The special task group from Changlin was Zhen Wuyu’s group. They were now basically stationed in Baimu Town, working with the Baimu bureau. But colleagues in Changlin were also working overtime to investigate. How could there be no results?
They just didn’t say it out loud.
After learning things from Chief Zhan Qing’s murder case, Zhen Wuyu worried the insider was still inside the system. Naturally he wouldn’t publicly share some investigations between the two bureaus. He ran the dispatching and secretly investigated. He had actually been watching Qi Xuan for a while.
On the road to Baimu Town, Changlin sent some lab results. Only now did he have enough leads and evidence to take the person.
That was why he changed course and went to the school.
And then he got mocked.
Especially about money.
Small favors, cheap clothes…
Qi Xuan nearly exploded. “Those still can’t count as hard evidence. They’re not key evidence. In court, I can still hire a lawyer to refute them…”
A third-year high school student, he knew quite a lot about this. If you said he didn’t commit a premeditated crime, no one would believe it.
Zhen Wuyu: “Shoes are the closest witness between humans and nature.”
“The pair of shoes you wore during the crime was soaked. You took them off with the wet clothes. But you couldn’t throw them away casually. You were afraid police would find them after the case. But you also couldn’t bring them back to school, so you burned them together with your mom’s body.”
“But shoes are different. Their material isn’t pure fabric. They have rubber soles. Mixed in with ashes, they’re not hard to identify. And the heel had a small metal tag.”
“Three sets, three pairs of shoes, all identical. You thought your swap was flawless, but instead the tag became the witness.”
“And the new shoes you wore later, comparing the footage with earlier footage using high-definition image analysis; you really think we can’t lock onto the differences?”
“Kid, it’s 2007. Technology out there is far more advanced than you imagine. Killing isn’t hard. Getting away perfectly isn’t easy.”
“With this much evidence, it’s still not enough to convict you?”
Qi Xuan’s face was iron-blue. His muscles were tense…
Su Li raised her brows and laughed.
Zhen Wuyu suddenly looked at her. “I can find the truth because of efforts across many departments, not just me alone. What about you? How did you know?”
“And what role do you represent in this?”
Qi Xuan suddenly screamed, “It was her! She made me do it! I didn’t know anything!”
Huh?
He looked like he couldn’t take the pressure and was breaking down, confessing the mastermind…
Su Li couldn’t keep smiling. Her expression went flat, her gaze slanted toward Qi Xuan.
When she was still in her young-miss mode, she looked at Zhen Wuyu with arrogant pickiness, let alone Qi Xuan.
Like she was looking at an idiot.
“Very simple, kid. I’m not police. I’m an outsider. But when I came to Baimu Town, the case had already happened. I bought malatang a few times and heard them talking about it. Guess how much I learned?”
“As long as I learned something and I’m curious, if I spend a little money, do you think I can see some shop cameras near the school?”
“Actually I don’t need to see much. I only need to tell: before your mom died, you dressed shabby. After she died, and the police were working overtime and still couldn’t find results, your clothes changed. You bought Nike shoes. Oh right, your watch changed too, from a street-stall fake to a real one. The level of spending changed.”
“Sure, your mom died. As the only heir, how flashy you get is your business. You’re still young. It’s normal to lose control of spending for a bit. But you also acted extremely grief-stricken to everyone…”
“The most important thing is, your mom was already in debt and couldn’t make ends meet. Where would she get money for you to inherit?”
“When she was alive she had no money. After she died, you, who should have even less money, suddenly had money.”
“So does that mean, if you killed her, you could get money?”
“Oh right, she often picked you up and even took you to the casino. I was thinking, could you have been influenced by that filthy environment; did you gamble too?”
“I’m just guessing. I don’t need evidence. If I want to come find you, I can come find you. Any problem with that?”
“Your face looks so ugly. Looks like I guessed right…”
“So in the end, it really was about money.”
She stood there like an evil golden flower blooming with the glow of money, high above, without the slightest pity for the human world, just like the sunset behind her was falling.
As if he, once the top-ranked student in his final year, with a bright future, had already fallen into the abyss.
Flesh and blood kin. Desire for money. Beyond hate, still hate.
Zhen Wuyu suddenly thought of three numbers.
1, 2, 4.
Money, hatred, emotion.
Here, it matched too.