Chapter 78

Fei Du had gone upstairs. There was a click, as if he'd locked the door from inside.

Luo Wenzhou sighed silently, forcing his attention back to the phone, saying to Tao Ran, "You're saying someone set the Dong house on fire. What was there worth burning in the Dong house?"

Tao Ran looked up at the scene of desolation in Dong Xiaoqing's burned house. Strictly speaking, the circumstances weren't all that grave. The fire had started in the living room and burned up a good part of the furniture and blackened the walls. The TV's carbon fiber frame had melted a little, but the wall the TV was on and the surrounding cabinets were all right, and in a drawer, the property ownership certificate, bankbook, and other such important items were unscathed.

"We've investigated the Dong family three times over, including the father and daughter's browsing history, e-mails, and social media. We also searched the house. If we somehow still missed something, either it was something very unremarkable…"

Luo Wenzhou interrupted him. "No, that's too big a scope."

"…or it wasn't in the house at all at the time." Tao Ran didn't get angry at all over being interrupted. He unhurriedly added the end of his sentence, and after a paused asked, "Do you have something pressing to take care of over there?"

Luo Wenzhou was at a loss for words.

Tao Ran said very understandingly, "Then let's hang up. When I've finished taking care of things here, I'll give you a report."

"Tao Ran, wait," Luo Wenzhou said quickly. "The complexity of this thing may exceed what we imagine. Be careful when you're out in the field. Starting from now, no one taking part in this investigation is permitted to operate on his own."

Tao Ran had worked with him for many years. Hearing his anxiety, he smoothly acknowledged, "Got it," then hung up the phone.

"Deputy-Captain Tao." Xiao Haiyang, the rims of his eyes red, came over. "It was the paper. I think the criminal's aim was the paper product he used to light the couch on fire."

Tao Ran said, "For what reason?"

"When one residence catches fire in this type of building, the neighbors to either side will report it very quickly. Unless he made sure the thing he wanted was entirely burned up, it's likely some traces would have been left behind because it hadn't finished burning." Xiao Haiyang's speech inadvertently sped up even more. "Also, Dong Qian's level of education wasn't high. I've been to the house a few times; aside from a few advertisements someone had shoved in, there were no books in the living room. Everything needed for writing and drawing was in Dong Xiaoqing's study. After the arsonist on the security camera footage broke into the Dong house, he stayed a full ten minutes. It doesn't take that long to start a fire. He must have been looking for something…"

"After he found it, he lit it on fire, made sure it was nearly burned up, then threw in onto the couch, lighting up the whole room." Tao Ran frowned. "Don't you think that's strange? Since this person could get into Dong Xiaoqing's house without anyone the wiser, couldn't he have just taken whatever he wanted? Why did he have to set the room on fire, making such a commotion and leaving an impression of himself? Was he purposefully calling for the police to investigate an arson?"

Xiao Haiyang stared, reduced to silence.

"Haiyang, I have a feeling that in his eyes, whatever Dong Xiaoqing had wasn't any particularly amazing secret. Making such a mystical production of burning it… It's to provoke us." Tao Ran pointed at his phone. "Go investigate whether it really was Dong Xiaoqing who sent you the text message, or if someone stole her phone number."

Xiao Haiyang put a hand on the phone, but his feet didn't move. "Deputy-Captain Tao, is Dong Xiaoqing really dead?"

Lang Qiao had sent the photographs of the scene to Tao Ran, and Dong Xiaoqing herself was already in the hands of the medical examiners. Tao Ran sighed and patted Xiao Haiyang on the shoulder.

"I…I talked to her quite a few times, and I privately assessed her. She absolutely wasn't the sort of person to pick up a knife and harm someone. Even though she had negative emotions, they were aimed at the people accusing her father. She never directed her anger towards the car crash victim's relatives," Xiao Haiyang said. "She stabbed someone, and immediately afterwards the criminal ran her over to shut her up, and her house was burned at the same time. There must be someone behind this manipulating…"

Tao Ran slowly pulled Xiao Haiyang's phone out of his hand. He saw that it was open to a news website Xiao Haiyang had been looking at.

Zhou Huaijin and his brother being attacked at the hospital door had already become public. The report only had a brief line of news, simply naming the casualties and identifying the killer, but the onlookers were all exhibiting their imaginations to add what they thought was an appropriate sequence of cause and effect to the bizarre story.

Xiao Haiyang's voice shook somewhat. "She wasn't like they're saying. Really."

"When he was alive, my shifu asked me something." Tao Ran gave the phone back to Xiao Haiyang. "The old fellow asked me, 'Do you believe that heaven's law is clear and brings appropriate retribution?'"

Xiao Haiyang stared blankly at him.

"I said of course I couldn't believe it. Wasn't that feudal superstition? Anyway, the old sayings are always self-contradictory. Sometimes they'll say, 'Heaven's law is clear and brings appropriate retribution,' and sometimes they'll say, 'The good don't live long, a scourge lasts a thousand years.' You don't know who to listen to." Tao Ran laughed. "My shifu said, 'You must believe it, because you're a criminal policeman. When you're chasing down suspected killers, you are heaven's law. The reason those words are feudal superstition is because you're useless, because you can't find the truth and clear away an injustice.'—Those are rough words, but the sense isn't rough. Let's encourage each other, little comrade. Start with the text message. Don't waste time beating your head against a brick wall. Go on."

Xiao Haiyang opened his mouth, pushed up his glasses, and quickly went to ask for technical assistance.

Tao Ran looked around the disordered scene of the fire. He sighed. Perhaps because he'd just mentioned Yang Zhengfeng to Little Glasses, he subconsciously got out his phone, hesitated, then opened Zero Hour Reading.

The newest guided reading topic threw itself into his eyes—"So foul and fair a day I have not seen.—Macbeth. Contributor: The Reciter."

"88.6 FM" were Yang Zhengfeng's dying words. Only Tao Ran had heard them, under extremely frantic circumstances. He hadn't even had a recorder on him at the time. There was no evidence apart from his disordered memories.

After Luo Wenzhou had pointed out the suspicious point of the underpass, the police had conducted a routine investigation into those questionable last words—they'd turned the head of the radio program and the relevant personnel upside-down, but they'd come up empty-handed. Any way you looked at it, it was an audiobook program for the amusement of a minority of the population.

The conclusion issued by the investigation team was that the portable radio in Yang Zhengfeng's pocket had fallen out in the struggle and had been tuned to that frequency; Tao Ran may have inadvertently heard a voice announcing the frequency on the radio, and under the circumstances had experienced some cognitive dissonance.

Tao Ran hadn't given up. He'd pursued the program on his own for two months. Aside from doing the equivalent of retaking middle school extracurricular reading, he'd come up with nothing. Even he would have accepted the cognitive dissonance explanation…if not for the fact that he'd developed a habit of listening to audiobooks and, whiling away the time when he was bored, discovered the ID "The Reciter."

Before, The Reciter wouldn't necessarily appear once in a whole year. Tao Ran had suspected that he was jumping at shadows, and that there wasn't anything wrong with the books this person chose—but this year there had been three cases in a row, all faintly reflected in a wholly unrelated reading program. If it was coincidence, then it really was too coincidental.

Standing in the scorched living room after the fire had been put out, Tao Ran stared at the subject line for a full minute, then gave a light shiver.

On the other end, Luo Wenzhou, heavily weighed down, hung up the phone and walked a few circles around the living room on his own. He decided to go upstairs to see Fei Du. When he reached the stairs, he inadvertently looked down and saw the path to the basement.

Luo Wenzhou's steps suddenly paused. He somehow remembered Fei Du's description of the basement on the road to Heng'ai Hospital.

Luo Wenzhou's feet, prepared to climb the stairs, inexplicably turned and headed down.

There was a bend in the stairs leading to the basement that kept the light from upstairs from shining in. The surroundings became increasingly dim. There was an additional security door installed at the end of the stairs, with a keypad lock on it.

Luo Wenzhou exchanged a helpless look with the keypad lock, got out his phone, and called Fei Du. It disconnected after two rings. The owner of the phone upstairs evidently didn't want to talk to him.

Luo Wenzhou opened the keypad for entering the code and examined it for a moment. He found that there was also an alarm attached—that was to say, if someone tried to force the door or entered the wrong code, an alarm like the wailing of ghosts and howling of wolves would go up over the whole villa.

"Maybe the alarm will startle the quail upstairs. It's more civilized than kicking down the door, anyway."

That lousy idea appeared in Luo Wenzhou's mind. While the wounds on his back wouldn't get in the way, they still hurt pretty badly. He didn't want to be kicking down doors today. He reached out a boorish paw, carelessly entered six digits on the keypad, then quickly blocked his ears.

But after a moment, the expected alarm didn't come. The light on the security door flashed twice. There was a click, and the lock slid open.

Luo Wenzhou: "…"

He awkwardly put down the hands blocking his ears and stared at the security door in front of him. He only then realized that he'd just entered the date of Fei Du's mother's death.

Luo Wenzhou absolutely hadn't expected to have the dumb luck of accidentally guessing the code. He was dumbfounded for a good while. He hesitated, looked upstairs, and gave Fei Du another call—this time the phone was simply off.

"Well, don't blame me," Luo Wenzhou whispered. "I take silence as acquiescence."

With justice on his side, he entered the residence's most secret corner. He encountered the underground gloomy dampness, turned on the light, and immediately froze—

The basement didn't contain the desk Fei Du had spoken of. It was very open and spacious. The floor, the walls, the cabinets, the ceiling…all of it was white. In the midst of it was a luxurious projection setup, with a screen as big as one in a movie theater's small screening theater. Right across from the screen was a reclining chair. There were belts on the chair, and a computer next to it, along with some complicated equipment for an unknown purpose. There was also a small refrigerator.

For no reason, Luo Wenzhou's palms broke out in cold sweat. He gently opened the small fridge. There were some small medicine bottles in it, the labels all written in some unknown foreign language. He couldn't understand them.

Perhaps it was his mistaken impression, but he seemed to faintly smell a trace of blood.

What had Fei Du been up to here?!

In an instant, Luo Wenzhou's heart rate sped up to 150. For a space of time his mind went blank, and he nearly froze in place, ten thousand bees flying around his ears.

After a good while, he gently bit his tongue and shook his head hard, gaze traveling all around. He thought, "No, that's not it. There aren't any convenient weapons here."

Given Fei Du's weak constitution, if he'd really wanted to do anything, he couldn't very well do it bare-handed.

Luo Wenzhou struggled to calm down and look carefully at the belts on the chair. His heart, which had come up to his throat, crashed back down into his chest. Luo Wenzhou breathed a sigh of relief—he found that he was jumping at shadows. The belts on the reclining chair were fashioned like safety belts; you could fasten and unfasten them yourself. It wouldn't be very useful for murder and dismemberment.

He touched the leather recliner, took separate photographs of the inexplicable instruments and the drugs, and stealthily sent them to Lang Qiao, telling her to investigate what these things were.

There was a set of headphones hanging on the back of the recliner. Luo Wenzhou picked them up and brought them close to his ear, turning on the audiovisual equipment.

First the unhurried music of "You Raise Me Up" flowed into his ears over the extremely high quality headphones. Luo Wenzhou had never noticed how pretty this song was; he was just sighing over the truth that expensive electronic equipment really was better when, without any warning, a hysterical scream suddenly stabbed through the music. Though Luo Wenzhou's psychological quality was superb, he still gave a fierce shudder.

Then the large screen suddenly lit up. He swiftly looked up—

There was a direct broadcast of a murder playing on it. This was a deranged homicidal maniac from abroad from a few years ago. The killer had already been given an injection and sent to their foreign god, and the video had been taken care of by the government, though it was still going around on the dark web. The victim in the video screamed like a dying farm animal. The sound of the scream intertwined with the music on the exquisitely good headphones, like two whips flogging your soul.

Luo Wenzhou, unable to stand it any longer, tore off the headphones and fast forwarded. There followed videos of beheadings, videos of executions by firing squad, videos of extremist organizations abusing prisoners of war and hostages, bloody photographs…

Luo Wenzhou's phone, which was on vibrate, buzzed suddenly. He gave a start, nearly dropping the phone onto the ground. His voice sounded off when he picked up. "Hello?"

"Boss, where are you? Can you talk?" Lang Qiao asked, keeping her voice low. "Have you wandered into some kind of underground rehab center?"

Luo Wenzhou frowned. "What rehab center?"

"I found someone to have a look at those photographs you sent," said Lang Qiao. "That's electric shock equipment, and the drugs are emetics, tranquilizers, and some others…"

Luo Wenzhou didn't clearly hear what she said afterwards.

Fei Du's ability to vomit himself into dehydration at the sight of blood, the ceaseless trembling of his hands just now, the constant repetition of the song… It seemed that all of it had an explanation.

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