Silent reading mo du vol.., p.8
Silent Reading: Mo Du Vol. 1, page 8
“I don’t quite understand what you mean,” Deputy Lu said in a low voice.
“Well, Director General Zhang wanted me to look into Wang Hongliang,” Luo Wenzhou replied. “And I’ve just received word from an informant that they suspect Wang Hongliang of working with the Huashi drug-trafficking syndicate.”
Deputy Lu frowned. “Huashi’s helped to lead the fight against drugs.”
“Yeah, and don’t you think it’s strange that Wang Hongliang’s team always manages to find such accurate informants so easily?” Luo Wenzhou asked in a rush. “My informant says they have an ‘officially approved’ drug-trafficking network. If you’re not in that group, you get caught as soon as you step into the jurisdiction.”
“Where’s the evidence?” Deputy Lu demanded immediately.
“We’re gathering it,” replied Luo Wenzhou. “Back to the murder case. Yesterday, we took unexpected statements from residents in that area that they’d heard arguments near the crime scene at around nine o’clock that evening. At that point, Wang Hongliang went right out and arrested a young man suspected of being at the scene at that time. The kid was skinny, he wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, and he was barely coherent—his statement was full of holes, and he seemed constantly terrified. But however long he was grilled, he was adamant that he hadn’t seen anyone else at the scene of the crime. Now we have evidence that the body may have been dumped there after all. Now I’m wondering, if the argument the neighbors overheard wasn’t related to the murder, then how come that young man, the suspect, was so afraid to tell the truth? Why did Officer Xiao Haiyang raise eyebrows by implying to us that the scene of the initial crime was elsewhere? Is it possible that he knew from the very beginning that no murder happened there?”
Deputy Lu couldn’t contain himself; he rose and began to pace.
“Uncle Lu,” said Luo Wenzhou, “there are so many clues here, and they’re all convoluted. The details of this case are way too muddy. I suspect the case has something to do with that report I received. Tao Ran and Xiao Haiyang found Zhang Donglai by utter coincidence, and if I hadn’t brought him straight here, there’s a high chance that Wang Hongliang would’ve used that as an excuse to force the director general and our team to stop interfering. That way, he could’ve shifted the focus of the investigation. Then he could have arranged for the kid in custody to die from an ‘overdose,’ disqualifying his statement because he’d made it ‘under the influence.’ That’d shut the door on the whole affair.”
“Luo Wenzhou, do you know what you’re saying?”
“Yes,” Luo Wenzhou said impassively. “I’m accusing a colleague of committing a crime.”
Deputy Lu hesitated. “What do you plan to do?”
“For now, designate Zhang Donglai a major suspect. Once Wang Hongliang sees us apparently shifting the investigation’s focus away from the West Side of Huashi, he’ll probably take advantage of the situation and transfer the case to us.”
***
THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION TEAM worked overtime on the security footage Fei Du had provided. By the time Luo Wenzhou arrived home, it was late at night. As soon as he opened the door, he heard a meow, and a shorthaired cat peeked out.
Luo Wenzhou stretched out a leg to push him back inside. “What are you meowing about? I didn’t eat either. Hmm…?”
He caught sight of a new parcel in the letterbox at the door. When he opened it, he found a sealed evidence bag full of cigarette butts. Luo Wenzhou stared. He lifted the parcel itself and tipped it over. There was nothing else.
Then his phone vibrated. Someone had sent him a photo of a solemn, deserted stone-paved lane, lying silent and narrow between a body of water and some shrubs. There was a lonely trash can in the center of the image. The text under the photo was neither a descriptive caption nor a sign-off, and it comprised only three words: by the way.
Luo Wenzhou studied the photo thoughtfully for a moment, but Lord Kitty next to him was tired of waiting. The cat’s full name was Luo Yiguo; middle-aged at seven years, he had a round face, large eyes, and sleek, shiny fur. He was perfectly adorable aside from his slightly impatient temperament. Luo Yiguo stretched out a paw and swatted Luo Wenzhou’s leg, then walked, butt swaying, to the corner of the room, where he squatted on the floor peevishly, and showed off his empty food bowl to his litter-shoveling slave.
That lumbering idiot only glanced at him, though. He didn’t even move! The unthinkably mistreated Luo Yiguo fumed. He charged and rose up on his hind legs to grab at Luo Wenzhou’s shin and bite his pant leg, yowling. Luo Wenzhou bent down and lifted him right off the ground by the scruff of his neck. “Got a death wish, you brat?”
Luo Yiguo unleashed an earsplitting howl. His claws flew through the air, and he stuck his tongue out cockily.
Luo Wenzhou rolled his eyes. He loosened his grip on Luo Yiguo, and the kitty easily freed himself, flipping gracefully through the air to land on all fours.
Very soon, Luo Yiguo received a sufficient quantity of dry cat food, along with a bonus can of wet.
This once again reinforced the completely satisfied Luo Yiguo’s belief in the axiom “spare the rod and spoil the child”—you had to bite your litter shoveler to keep him in line.
Luo Wenzhou sat down and caressed his cat carelessly for a while. Abruptly, he looked down at Luo Yiguo’s fluffy, upright tail and recalled the beast’s origins. Tao Ran had purchased His Lordship from a morning market way back when as a present for the young Fei Du. Fei Du had seemed to like him a lot at first, but after a few days at home with the cat, he suddenly grew tired of him and refused point-blank to keep him. Tao Ran’s hometown was far away, and as a new officer who couldn’t afford to own property, he moved often. That made it difficult to keep a pet, so he gave the cat to Luo Wenzhou to foster.
Cats, dogs, and noisy children under the age of sixteen—Luo Wenzhou hated them. He despised fostering the cat so much that it drove him crazy, and so he gave Tao Ran an ultimatum: Find the four-pawed nuisance another home within the month, or Luo Wenzhou would boil him into soup.
Seven years passed in the blink of an eye, and no other home was ever found for Luo Yiguo. Luo Wenzhou had devolved from a blustery carnivore into a dutiful, uncomplaining, litter-shoveling slave. Meanwhile, Luo Yiguo rose in status from backup meal to lord of the household. Such was life in this inconstant world.
After contemplating the cat for a moment longer, Luo Wenzhou stood suddenly and grabbed some half-eaten bread from the fridge, then left again. The streets weren’t as congested at this hour, and despite his deep desire to always arrive at and leave work exactly on time, Sergeant Luo now rushed back to the city bureau. As soon as he walked into the office, he found that someone was still there, rubbing his eyes as he scrubbed through the security footage again and again.
Luo Wenzhou’s steps paused, and he sighed. “I knew you’d still be here.”
Tao Ran stretched. “It’s not like I have much else to do at home. How come you’re back here?”
“It was so depressing to think of you sad and lonely, working overtime this late at night, that I had to come keep you warm.” Luo Wenzhou sauntered over and sat on his desk. “Any new discoveries, Mr. Model Worker?”9
“Chengguang Mansion’s security cameras are all outdoors. Our tech guys just checked over the footage from eight o’clock to midnight on the twentieth. There were four points where Zhang Donglai clearly appeared on the outdoor cameras. And according to the facial recognition software, there were forty minutes when he was neither inside the club nor within view of the outdoor cameras. Those forty minutes are cumulative, though—he moved out of sight repeatedly, but for very short periods each time. There were only two occasions when he deliberately tried to avoid the cameras. One was around ten o’clock, when he left with a girl for under twenty minutes; he looked up specifically to check for the camera. He did that again near midnight, but Chengguang Mansion’s cameras shut off after then, so we don’t know what time he came back.”
Luo Wenzhou rubbed his chin. “They left for under twenty minutes…?”
Tao Ran nodded earnestly. “Yes. But if we find the girl, she can probably vouch for him.”
“Tch.” Luo Wenzhou shook his head. “He was that quick?” This left Tao Ran at a loss for words. But before he could recover enough to react, Luo Wenzhou adopted a more proper tone. “Does He Zhongyi appear anywhere on the recordings?”
“It seems like he doesn’t. This afternoon, our team picked out twenty-odd frames that could have He Zhongyi in them, but the cameras never actually caught his face, and some of the frames were from pretty far away. I looked through them, and in my opinion, he’s not in any of them. If the killer really did murder He Zhongyi at Chengguang Mansion, do you think they’d be careless enough to get caught on camera?”
“We didn’t spot He Zhongyi at any of the entrances, either. Maybe he was deliberately avoiding the cameras.” Luo Wenzhou stood and started pacing behind Tao Ran. “But if there really wasn’t anything, Fei Du wouldn’t have brought this footage over.”
“With that many cameras covering four hours… How could he have watched it all by himself?” Tao Ran responded. “Maybe he just gave it to us so that we could check it?”
Luo Wenzhou shook his head. After a moment, a thought came to him. “You said they shut off the cameras after midnight?”
“Yeah. Only the ones near the parking lot and a few small paths outside the club kept running.”
“They probably turned most of them off so that they wouldn’t capture those drunks at their worst, then left the rest on for security.” Luo Wenzhou set his hands on the back of Tao Ran’s chair. “The courtyard cameras were probably in visible places, so guests could easily avoid them if they wanted to. But they might’ve set the cameras outside in darker corners as a precaution against break-ins… Pull up the footage from the cameras that were on all night.”
“That’d make sense,” Tao Ran agreed.
Unlocking his phone, Luo Wenzhou glanced at the photo he’d just received. “Any cameras facing a cobbled road next to some water?”
“Funnily enough, one is.”
***
THE CAMERA’S DISPLAY TIME flashed 8:00 p.m. sharp. The screen was pitch-black. As they watched the sped-up recording, the black shadow in the middle of the screen suddenly flapped away, out of sight. It had been a bird.
The four corners of the image captured by the camera were black; only a small patch in the center was visible. Birds darting in and out frequently obscured that patch—maybe the camera was hidden in a birdhouse.
At around 8:50 p.m., a wobbling figure appeared beneath the camera, near the trash can. Tao Ran immediately paused. The figure had probably come to the trash can to smoke, not noticing the camera in the tree.
“Wait, this guy… He looks a little like He Zhongyi!” Tao Ran studied the figure more closely, then sighed. “If the butts are still there, we could potentially compare DNA to confirm. Then again, it poured rain this afternoon. So now, I guess—what? What are you laughing at?”
Luo Wenzhou reached into his pocket and retrieved an evidence bag full of cigarette butts. “Go get them tested.”
Tao Ran was shocked. “How did you… Where did you…”
“Shh. Keep it quiet. We didn’t acquire this evidence through the proper channels, so we can only use it to privately confirm our suspicions.” Luo Wenzhou put a finger to his lips, then whispered almost inaudibly, “A very annoying young man sent me these.”
Tao Ran looked even more shocked. “Fei Du? Did you guys call a truce?”
Luo Wenzhou didn’t reply. He placed a hand on the back of Tao Ran’s head and turned it back toward the screen. “Any other clues nearby?”
“Oh, right. Hold on,” Tao Ran said, digging out a marked map. “This road only leads to two places: Chengguang Mansion at one end and a public space at the other. After this person—potentially He Zhongyi—left, he definitely didn’t head toward Chengguang Mansion, so he must have gone the other way… That would’ve taken him to the main road. There’s a bus stop there.”
Luo Wenzhou smiled. “I like public places. You can search them anytime without needing to deal with any of those fussy rich folk.” Following the lead, the pair headed straight over to the traffic-police team situated by the bus stop.
***
IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT; dew would start to appear at any moment. Luo Wenzhou switched off the car AC and opened the window to let the wind in. “Whatever we find out tonight, don’t tell anyone else. That includes our teammates.”
Tao Ran blinked. “Why?”
“No reason,” said Luo Wenzhou. “I don’t expect it’ll be more than a few days before the district bureau applies for a case transfer, and after that, you can focus exclusively on the He Zhongyi case and set everything else aside. We can keep Zhang Donglai as a ‘suspect’ for a couple more days before we find the true perpetrator. It’ll teach him a good lesson.”
Tao Ran detected an uncommon strain of solemnity in these words. He couldn’t help turning to look at Luo Wenzhou.
Luo Wenzhou cocked one eyebrow slightly. “What’re you peeking at? Am I too good-looking to resist?”
“Whatever you say, you sad bachelor. I guess teasing me is free—you must be bargain-hunting, huh?” Tao Ran spread his hands magnanimously. “By the way, I haven’t seen you go out with anyone in a long time. What happened to that one you were playing pool with?”
“Oh, we broke up. He went abroad to study.”
“Huh?”
“To study Chinese. In Italy.”
Tao Ran almost choked on his own saliva. “How could he be so frivolous?” Luo Wenzhou shrugged expressionlessly, and Tao Ran sighed. “Be grateful. At least your family isn’t getting on your case.”
Tao Ran’s words and tone let Luo Wenzhou instantly deduce his troubles. “Your family’s pushing you to get married, huh? I’m too handsome, so fate is less kind to me, but why can’t you find a partner?”
Tao Ran thought it over, then gave a clipped but emphatic answer: “I’m poor.”
Luo Wenzhou couldn’t help bursting into laughter.
“What’re you laughing at? I can’t compare to you. My salary’s barely enough to pay my mortgage. I’m poor—that’s the objective truth.” Tao Ran ran his fingers through his bird’s-nest-like hair rather indifferently. “But now that I’ve managed to piece together my down payment, I’m finally entitled to be matchmade—I’ll be satisfied with that, I think. It’s not like I need to marry my dream girl.”
Luo Wenzhou flashed his high beams at a road sign and saw that they weren’t far from their destination. “You have a dream girl?” he asked, gazing calmly ahead.
“The girl in the class next door in high school,” Tao Ran said. “She looked like Angie Chiu. We haven’t been in touch in years. She might be married to someone else now. Even if she isn’t, she’d never get married to me… We’re almost there. Let me call the guys on duty to let them know.”
***
FIVE MINUTES LATER, Luo Wenzhou parked the car. Tao Ran was just about to get out when Luo Wenzhou turned to him and said, “Let me ask you a very serious question.”
Tao Ran stared, bewildered. “What?”
“Let’s just say, hypothetically, that you were a woman. Who would you marry, me or Fei Du?”
“Lao-Luo,” Tao Ran replied with sincerity, “I haven’t seen such a childish romantic rivalry since I graduated from kindergarten.”
“Hypothetically.”
Tao Ran paused to think. “If I were a woman, I wouldn’t have time to spare on you two,” he concluded. “I’d be busy stressing over how to come out to my mom as a lesbian.”
“You couldn’t come out of the closet, because all the other women in the world would be dead,” Luo Wenzhou said impatiently. “All the other men would be dead too. It’d just be Fei Du and me. Who would you pick?”
As Luo Wenzhou’s casual words turned six billion people to ash and scattered them in the wind, Tao Ran pursed his lips. “You, then,” he said finally, resigned.
Hearing that, Luo Wenzhou simply couldn’t help it; he smiled the triumphant smile of a fox in a henhouse. “Me? You sure?”
“Of course. You’re the only one I could choose.” Tao Ran counted on his fingers. “Fei Du’s still two months too young to marry legally… Hey, what’re you doing?”
Luo Wenzhou put his phone away, smirking as if he’d won a great victory.
Tao Ran didn’t understand what he was so smug about. Thinking back on their conversation, he shuddered, his skin breaking into goose bumps.
He shook his head and got out of the car, not seeing that Luo Wenzhou had recorded their conversation on the sly.
***
GETTING SECURITY-CAMERA footage was easy enough for city bureau police, so long as that footage wasn’t from a private location like Chengguang Mansion.
However, the bus-stop camera failed to confirm what time the man they suspected was He Zhongyi had arrived near Chengguang Mansion. Still, it did offer the two officers another pleasant surprise. The footage showed that at around nine o’clock, the man had walked out of that little lane and straight to the bus stop, where he boarded the number Thirty-Four bus.
In the process, he looked up at the bus-stop sign long enough for Luo Wenzhou and Tao Ran to confirm that he was indeed He Zhongyi.
Chapter 9
WHEN THE THERAPIST’S CLINIC closed for the day, the final client rose to bid her a courteous goodbye, taking out a box of elegantly wrapped chocolates as he did so. “Thank you for your efforts, Dr. Bai. I brought you these to try—I thought you might like the flavor.”
