Chapter 56

In the dim room, the places sprayed with luminol solution glowed with a faint fluorescence. The floor, the ceiling, the cracks around the doors… Vast swaths linked together, all over, like dizzying wallpaper.

Where the couch had been moved away there were age-old bloodstains that hadn't been cleaned up. On the otherwise spotless pale floor, they were especially startling, an injustice from who knew how many years past finally coming to light.

The walls were covered in soundproofing. In the living room, there was one wall hung with photographs. Exquisite fields and natural scenery were displayed there, giving off a tasteful atmosphere of culture—if not for the fact that they were also coated with fluorescence.

In the bedroom, meanwhile, hung a sheep-herding picture. The meter-high frame was very solid. A crime scene technician stared at it for a while, thinking there was something not right. He took it down to investigate and found a stealth camera installed inside. The lens peered out from the shepherdess's eye, giving the young girl's quiet smile an unwarranted hint of furtiveness.

In the locked storage room next to the bedroom were hidden all the cutting tools and bindings the medical examiners needed…

But not one of them was as horrifying as the enlarged photograph on the window.

"Look, Deputy Tao, this window is one of the old-style ones split into an inner and outer layer. Between them there's a blackout curtain like you usually get in hotels, and the photograph is stuck onto the outside of the glass," said the crime scene technician to Tao Ran. "This way, even if there was a solar storm outside, the UV-blocking curtain would still shield it. No strong light would pass through to the photo paper… Tsk, this photograph really has been arranged here with skill!"

The photograph had been carefully enlarged to accurate proportions. In the realistic darkness of the surroundings, standing in that room, a person would really be unable to tell the difference between dawn and dusk, day and night. At a glance, you might think that outside the window glass was this night scene—the narrow street, the old thinly-spread buildings arranged in rows, the distant streetlamp as before more than a hundred meters away, the flowerbeds left to grow on their own, delicate flowers and tangled weeds living together. A small part had withered somehow, and from this lofty point of view, you could see a faint light among the dried branches. The light reflected from somewhere onto the half-hidden basement past the flowerbeds, and the basement revealed a corner of a small window, with a girl's blurred face.

This was important evidence. Two crime scene technicians carefully came up and took the photograph down along with the glass.

Tao Ran pulled open the light-blocking curtain and opened the outer window. At that moment, his pupils contracted slightly, the hot sweat worked up rushing around under the sun receding like the tide—

Tao Ran suddenly saw that outside the window, the locations of the staff levels and the stones used to represent Wu Guangchuan's house dovetailed perfectly with the photograph when the window was closed.

"Deputy Tao! Deputy Tao!" A trainee from the Criminal Investigation Team who'd been left behind by the others to interrogate the property management came running over, starting to clamor while still in the corridor. "The property management admitted it! They say this apartment really is illegally rented, but the tenants don't seem to live here normally, maybe they're just office workers who work nearby and come here to have a nap in the afternoon or something. The property management people say they don't use the stove, and the water and electricity go slowly, so they think there's no safety hazard, so… Fuck!"

"Careful, this is a crime scene!"

"Don't blunder around in here, stay back!"

Seeing the "magnificent" room from the door, the youngster had been dumbstruck, earning a scolding from his colleagues.

"No safety hazard." Tao Ran was looking out the window without blinking. "Can we contact the owner?"

"The-the owner is abroad, I just called, the number's disconnected, we have to think of another way." At this point the trainee remembered something. "Oh, right, Deputy Tao, 201's parking spot is occupied, there's an SUV!"

The traffic police quickly turned up information about the car's owner—it wasn't the owner of 201, nor was it anyone connected with the case. The recorded owner was an old fart who had nothing to do with anything. While his registered address was still in Yan City, he'd moved out of town years ago. Receiving a call from the police, the old fart was at first utterly flummoxed, until he heard the them ask about the license plate number and began to get a little panicked.

After some more questioning, they found that while the license plate was his, the car wasn't.

The old man had moved out of town to live with his children after retirement. He had no more use for a license plate here, so, since it had been hard to get license plates these last few years, he'd used the opportunity to privately rent it out and earn a bit of money each year, which was no bother. He only had to show up for the annual check-up, and the renter even reimbursed his travel fees.

"Are…you going to fine me? Or suspend my license?" The owner of the license plate defended himself, "Comrade Policeman, I really didn't get that much money, about two-thousand a year, if you don't believe me, you can look at the contract…"

"You guys signed a contract to illegally rent out a license plate?" Tao Ran really had nothing to say to this. "Who was the person who signed the contract with you?"

"Oh… It was a woman, called Su…Su what? Oh, yes, Su Xiaolan!"

Tao Ran hung up the phone and turned around at once. "Investigate the car's driving history from the day Qu Tong went missing up to now!"

"Deputy-Captain Tao, there's no GPS or driving record installed in that car, we had to rely on the traffic cameras.—The day before the recording was left at Qu Tong's house, this car left the city by South Airport Highway, turned onto Yan Port Highway, and two hours later left the highway for a national road. After another half-hour, it exited the national road and turned out of security camera range. The next day it went back by the same road. It didn't stop at a gas station the whole way."

That was to say, after the car had left the national road, it hadn't gone very far at all.

"What was nearby when it left the national road?"

"Some natural villages…a seaside sanatorium, an agritourism place, an oil-painting village."

Seaside?

Tao Ran approached the wall of photographs in the living room. Among them there was a photograph of a reef washed by the waves at sunset.

"Determine where all the photographs on this wall were taken. Let's go!"

As Tao Ran and the others left the city, Luo Wenzhou and Fei Du returned to it.

The sun was sinking once again into the west. The summer heat was still steaming so it was hard to open your eyes. Yan City's City Bureau had quieted down a little. When Luo Wenzhou returned, the work of recording everyone's information had basically been concluded, and the family members had been sent home to wait for news. Some people either lived too far away to return home or were simply unwilling; they were still pacing around the City Bureau. The officers on duty and the Criminal Investigation Team had had to arrange for them to eat in the dining hall.

Luo Wenzhou twisted open a water bottle, snatched two packets of instant coffee from Lang Qiao's desk, poured them into the mouth of the bottle, and gave it a few forceful shakes. The instant coffee unwillingly half-combined with the cold water, brewing up an exotic color and even more exotic taste. Then, under Fei Du's shocked gaze, he drank half the bottle in one go. "What are you looking at? It's not like I'm drinking piss."

Fei Du felt that even his retinas had a stomachache, as if he'd drunk a big mouthful of cold sesame oil with his eyes. He quickly averted his gaze, concentrating on the photographs they'd removed from the box of ashes.

"Over twenty years, more than a hundred missing girls. Though the standards for 'membership' must be rather harsh, isn't five suspects too few?" Fei Du tightly tapped on the photographs in his hand. "And these all seem pretty new, probably from these last few years…"

His voice suddenly stopped.

Luo Wenzhou gave him a slightly questioning look. Fei Du, using a glasses wiping cloth, carefully picked up one of the photographs—it was of a man with his head raised, rather refined, around forty, even looking fairly regular.

Each person recorded in these photographs had had several pictures taken of him, probably by stealth, and then the more recognizable among them had been left behind. This man's other photographs featured either beastly revelry or a sinister and twisted expression. There was only this one where his expression was a little more normal and you could more or less see that he was human.

"This person looks a little familiar." Fei Du scratched his chin. "Familiar, but I can't remember him. He must not be someone I met in the course of business. When I collect business cards I purposefully take note of the person's facial characteristics and afterwards jot them down on the back of the business card, to save myself the awkwardness of not recognizing them after too long a time. He also can't be someone I've gone out to have fun with. Ordinarily there's only a small group I go out with, and even when we bring someone along, we wouldn't bring along this type of…unremarkable old man. My sensitivity towards people's faces is very average. If I see someone once, I generally won't remember them, so this must have been within the last thirty days."

Drinking his piss-like instant coffee, Luo Wenzhou listened with a great sense of novelty as Fei Du disassembled his own memory—his understanding of himself was like that of a nerd who knew all the ins and outs of a computer, precise and objective. While he couldn't remember everything that had happened, he could trace all its inner workings.

It seemed that he had to regularly pry open his brain and subject each thought to intense, detailed scrutiny.

During this moment, Fei Du had already quickly recalled everything he'd done in the last month—a middle-aged man with a bland, middle-grade Swiss watch on his wrist, some buying power. Reasonably speaking, he wouldn't show up in any of the places where the meddlesome rich youngsters gathered…

Just then, Lang Qiao came in like a dead dog. "Boss, you're back. I don't want to settle the victims' relatives anymore! I…"

Luo Wenzhou held up a finger at her.

"The pianist," Fei Du said suddenly. "At the West Ridge racing club, his photograph was on the wall. The day Qu Tong disappeared, he was absent, so the owner had invited a stray music group to liven things up… That's right. If a person who wasn't familiar with the terrain ran into a one-in-a-million chance hijacking, his first reaction would be to withdraw, avoid the business, not conveniently 'herd a sheep.'"

"No wonder none of the cameras at the exits caught him that day. Since it's a 'membership' arrangement, these people must introduce each other. We can trace down the other four, too. If the ringleader won't talk, can't we get it out of these little devils?" Luo Wenzhou turned to Lang Qiao. "You don't like settling victims' relatives. Will arresting people do?"

Hearing the words "arresting people," Lang Qiao's interest perked up, her listlessness falling away. Without another word, she took the photographs and ran.

Luo Wenzhou put a file under his arm and stamped on the ground to wake a colleague who was napping in the office. "Wake up, let's go! Come with me to question Xu Wenchao again."

The two of them went out one after the other. Fei Du stood and gave a very restrained stretch. He was surrounded by the swirling smells of cigarette smoke and sesame oil. He felt it would be very unsuitable to remain here much longer and was planning to leave when Luo Wenzhou returned.

"I have some things to say to you," said Luo Wenzhou. "Though I have to go do some work now. Don't go yet. You can wait in my office for now."

When he was finished, he hurriedly left again.

Fei Du froze. Having taken half a step to leave, he hesitated a moment, then finally withdrew it.

Xu Wenchao wasn't after all as heartless as Su Luozhan. He evidently hadn't slept the night before.

His eyes were sunken in. He'd made mental preparations to be repeatedly questioned by the police—that was all right; he had very definite alibis for both kidnappings.

That was why Su Luozhan had dared to call him out.

Yan City's City Bureau wasn't a little police station in some remote county; someone was watching everything they said and did. They absolutely wouldn't dare to use any kind of torture tactics against an underage girl who wasn't even fourteen.

And as for him, there was no real evidence. When the custody period had elapsed, they'd have to let him go whether they liked it or not.

But he'd waited a whole day and night without anyone paying attention to him.

The City Bureau's policemen seemed to have forgotten such a person existed.

Xu Wenchao's face was calm, but as time had rolled on, he had gradually lost his initial composure and was feeling rather agitated—could they have heard his alibi and completely believed it? Abandoned the investigation?

Though that was for the best…if he had been cleared of suspicion, why hadn't they released him?

In the midst of Xu Wenchao's nervousness, Luo Wenzhou came in with his colleague.

"I kind of stink of cigarettes." Luo Wenzhou pulled out a chair and sat down across from him. "Sorry, I worked all night, mostly for the sake of grabbing your foxtail."

Xu Wenchao was shaken by these words. He lightly adjusted his posture and raised an unmoved gaze to look at Luo Wenzhou. "I really don't have anything else to say about this."

Luo Wenzhou smiled at him, seeming very casual, and said, "What's your relationship with Su Luozhan?"

"I was her mother's fiancé," Xu Wenchao answered patiently. "Officer, I've already answered this question."

"I know you were Su Xiaolan's fiancé." Luo Wenzhou raised his brows. Suddenly, he looked at him with a certain meaningful expression. "What I want to know is, were you planning to wed Su Xiaolan because of your remaining passion for that faded beauty, or because you'd taken a liking to her little daughter?"

At first Xu Wenchao froze. Then he immediately opened his eyes wide and said with difficult-to-conceal fury, "My good officer, take responsibility for your words!"

Luo Wenzhou's expression didn't flicker. "Su Xiaolan was a single mother with no education, no background, and a shady source of income, surrounded by ugly-sounding rumors. While you, Mr. Xu, have a successful career, have a house and a car, and aren't bad-looking, either. You ought to be an ideal partner. I've thought it was strange all along. If what you said is true, why wouldn't she be willing to marry you?"

"Love and marriage can't be judged by material conditions." Xu Wenchao laughed and forced his anger down with difficulty, preserving his demeanor. "Also, that's private business between us, I want—"

Luo Wenzhou interrupted him. "Was she unwilling to marry you because she had an unusual disdain for money, or was it that you didn't want to marry her?"

"What connection does that have to this case?" Xu Wenchao said coldly. "You can question me about anything related to the case, even though I'm innocent, but you can't insult my…"

Luo Wenzhou interrupted him again. "Insult the photograph stuck onto the south-facing bedroom window in the Sunward Estate's Building 8, Unit 3, Apartment 201? Insult your…love?"

Xu Wenchao's body abruptly stiffened. The blood drew back from his face like the tide.

For a time, the interrogation room was silent.

The criminal policeman taking notes next to them had worked all night. He'd just had a muddled nap in the duty room and hadn't yet had a chance to catch up with his colleagues' latest progress. He hadn't been able to resist yawning under cover of turning a page. Hearing these words, his half-yawn caught in his throat. Dumb as a wooden chicken, he looked at Luo Wenzhou, then looked at Xu Wenchao.

Xu Wenchao's ears roared. The drop of agitation stirred up by Luo Wenzhou's words just now seemed to be a lead, bringing a bolt of lightning down from the heavens and sweeping a conflagration across the prairie. He struggled to squeeze a denial out of his throat. "What…are you talking about?"

"The Sunward Estate. Building 8. Your photographic juvenilia is still plastered to the window," Luo Wenzhou said, one word at a time. "There are bloodstains on the scene, so the DNA can still be traced. Your hair is in the SUV parked in that apartment's parking spot. There are also the photographs taken by the hidden eyes behind the picture frame, which I just received from Su Xiaolan's own hands."

Smiling, he knocked on the table. "Mr. Xu, can the two of us have a chat now?"