Chapter 47

"Hello, is this Student Su Luozhan? I'm Teacher Wang from the Children's Palace, the one who issued your registration cards when school started. Do you remember?"

"I remember, Teacher Wang."

"It's so late; you aren't sleeping yet? Are your mom and dad nearby? I want to say a few words to you, but I need to have your mom and dad agree first."

"Dad hasn't come home yet. Mom is sick. She's sleeping and I can't wake her up. Why don't you just tell me?"

"Oh…all right, I'll just ask you a few questions. It's like this: there's a child in the art class called Zhang Yuchen. She went missing after school let out today. Someone said they saw you two playing together. Do you remember where you saw her for the last time?"

Silence.

"Hello, Student Su Luozhan, are you still there?"

"…I'm here. Sorry, teacher, the signal is bad here. You were saying the art class's…"

"Student Zhang Yuchen. The one who's very short, with her hair in a little braid."

"Oh, we went to the little park to play together a while. There were lots of us, from other classes, too. Afterwards we all left. We didn't know where she went."

"Really? All right, then. You go to bed soon. Don't be late for class tomorrow."

"Okay, teacher. If you find her, don't forget to call and tell us. I'm worried."

Lang Qiao turned off the record of the phone call. "Because there was no guardian with this child, and because her explanations more or less matched with the others, the teacher didn't ask any more. What do you think of this dialogue? I still think it's hard to believe, but when I think about it, if the suspect is a child, that explains why Qu Tong would be willing to get into a stranger's car in an extremely frightening situation, and why Deputy Tao and I couldn't find anything on all of those security tapes. It's…too horrifying."

Luo Wenzhou pushed Su Luozhan's personal information in front of her. "I'll show you something more horrifying."

The name filled in as Su Luozhan's emergency contact was "Su Xiaolan"; the relationship was "mother and daughter."

A few police cars arrived swift as the wind at Su Luozhan's recorded address.—It was a fairly well-appointed estate. In the middle of the night, all was still. The dozing door guard was startled awake and looked blankly at the ID in Luo Wenzhou's hand.

"Do you have a mother and daughter surnamed Su living here?"

The security guard stared so hard he went cross-eyed. "I, I-I don't know, I-I-I just came…"

"Go to the property management and get the previously recorded register of owners," Luo Wenzhou said quickly. "Everyone be careful. If this girl really is the suspect we're looking for, the circumstances will be very unusual. She'll be more unstable than the average adult. We absolutely must not provoke her. In case the victims are still alive, our actions can't be allowed to lead to an unimaginable consequence."

"Captain Luo, it's 401!"

"If everyone's got it, then let's go."

In the fourth floor corridor, a crowd of people concealed themselves in a corner of the stairs. Luo Wenzhou lifted his chin, indicating for Lang Qiao to knock on the door.

Lang Qiao rubbed at her frosty face, which looked as if it had been injected with Botox, twisting it into the kindest and gentlest expression it had ever worn. She went up to the door and knocked. "Is there anyone home?"

No one answered her.

Lang Qiao felt rather harassed—she was used to acting the fiend; displaying a "kindly" aspect wasn't really in her line.

She squeezed a soft and gentle voice out of her throat. "Is there anyone home? I'm the tenant who just moved in upstairs. My apartment seems to have sprung a bit of a leak. I'm sorry, I hope it hasn't poured down?"

As before, there wasn't a sound.

An accompanying technician furtively passed her a reverse peephole. Lang Qiao attached it to the peephole, bent slightly, and peered inside.

There was no one at the entrance. She could see to the living room at the end of the entry hall. The apartment was dim. The only light was at the center of the living room. Looking closely, Lang Qiao found that source of the light was an incense altar; on each side were electric red candles and altar lamps, laid out in front of a black and white photograph of the deceased.

The woman's somber face reflected a bit of the light from the incense altar, coldly exchanging a look with her. A shiver leapt up Lang Qiao's spine, and she subconsciously backed away.

Luo Wenzhou gave her a questioning look.

Lang Qiao gave a fierce shudder and hastily shook her head. She raised her hand and knocked on the door once again. "Anyone there? If you'd rather not open the door, you can just answer me. I just want to ask whether you have a leak."

The awkward silence stretched out in the small corridor. Luo Wenzhou suddenly reached out a hand and made Lang Qiao back away. "Open the door."

Lang Qiao stared. "Boss…"

There was no evidence and no witnesses; they hadn't even been able to obtain a warrant. All they had were subjective guesses…

"It's all right," Luo Wenzhou said heavily. "If there's a problem, I'll take responsibility. Open it."

Several criminal policemen and technicians swarmed up and had the door pried open in a flash.

An indescribable odor surged up and hit them full in the face—it was a grotesque combination of incense and candle scents mixed with the stuffiness of midsummer humidity and long-unopened windows, fermented so that the sense of smell somehow registered it as almost an odor of decay.

And there was no one in the apartment.

The apartment wasn't large, fifty or sixty square meters at most, a regulation one living room and one bedroom, but Su Xiaolan's black and white portrait keeping watch there alone gave it an odd sense of void.

The portrait of the deceased faced a double bed arranged in the living room. The silk bedspread was darkly colored; at the head of the bed were a bottle of dark nail polish and half a pack of cigarettes.

The bedroom next door was a little smaller and looked like a place where a little girl lived. A row of dull-eyed cheap Western dolls was arranged on the small single bed, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, facing the door together; all of them wore floral-patterned dresses.

"Heavens." Lang Qiao pulled open the wardrobe in the girl's room. Inside, without exception, everything was floral-patterned dresses. Even stranger, the designs on these clothes matched the dresses on the dolls. Gooseflesh stood up on Lang Qiao's arms. "Is this a place for a person to live?"

Luo Wenzhou put on gloves and rooted around in the wardrobe. Suddenly, he found a small box among the pile of clothes.

He found the latch and snapped open the lid of the box. The sound of "Für Elise" was set free from the box's crevices. It was a music box; presumably the power was running low, making the piano music a little off key, seeming sluggish and weird.

Then the surrounding criminal policemen got a clear look at what was inside.

Lang Qiao covered her mouth—inside the box was a naked doll with one arm and one leg removed, the limbs laid out on strips of bloody cloth.

The strips of cloth were cotton, with a lively pattern of small white flowers opening cluster after cluster—

"This is Qu Tong's dress. Her parents showed us a photograph of her wearing that dress at home. I remember the quality of the dress wasn't very good, some of the pattern had gotten into the side seam. It looked very uneven…" With difficulty, Lang Qiao pointed at a strip of cloth with stitches on it. "Just…just like that."

His face grim, Luo Wenzhou closed the box's lid. "Take it back to be examined."

Then he turned and went into the bathroom.

The damp bathroom had grown an abundance of mold, which was aggressively spreading everywhere. In front of the carved mirror missing a corner were two toothbrushes, a row of many-colored lipsticks, and some used cotton swabs that hadn't been thrown away.

"What did she say to the teacher then?" Luo Wenzhou muttered to himself, walking around in a circle, "'Mom is sick. She's sleeping and I can't wake her up. Dad hasn't come home yet?' But there are no signs of a man living here. What 'dad' was she talking about? Are you sure that the phone call earlier was taken around here?"

"Captain Luo, I've found the phone she took the call on." A criminal policeman cautiously picked up an elderly, heavily scratched-up cell phone from under a small coffee table in the living room. After going through it, he reported, "The teacher's phone call is in the recent calls!"

So the girl had just been there!

Luo Wenzhou swiftly turned and walked over. "But where is she now?"

Su Luozhan was a child, after all. She wouldn't have known how many security cameras the Children's Palace had. It was likely she hadn't expected she would be filmed at the playground. Then, having taken the teacher's phone call in the middle of the night, would she have realized in a panic that she had exposed herself?

What would she do?

And most importantly, where was Zhang Yuchen?

When Qu Tong had gone missing out in the wilderness, the person who'd taken her had worn size forty-two shoes and been able to drive a car. That couldn't have been such a small girl. This meant that Su Luozhan's mysterious "dad" was very likely her accomplice.

It was evident that Zhang Yuchen wasn't in this small apartment with its offerings to the dead. Then could she be with the accomplice? If that was the case, then would Su Luozhan have run over to find her accomplice when she'd been alerted by the phone call?

If Chenchen was still alive, would they act recklessly because of this, "freeing" themselves of Chenchen ahead of time?

Could the child live until daybreak?

The midsummer night was like a piece of caramel melting in the heat, thick and sticky. The girl ran quickly through the silent streets, the clattering of her own footsteps like a shadowing monster. Around her were the occasional movements of stray cats and dogs, all of them making her quiver with terror. The girl charged right into an old-fashioned "small two-story."

These so-called "small two-stories" were a type of building from twenty to thirty years ago, built in a row, usually only two or three floors high. Each small building had a yard in front of it, with just about enough space in each yard to plant a grapevine. At first glance they looked something like villas, but in fact the space inside was very cramped, and the conditions were poor. A few families usually shared one little yard. Living there was very inconvenient, and once summer came there was every evil imaginable, the wind and rain seeping in. They were supposed to be torn down soon.

The girl tried twice before she succeeded in getting the key into the lock. She rushed in and grabbed the phone by the door, quickly dialing a number. The call connected. Lengthy dial tones sounded, each one knocking on the pit of her stomach. She unconsciously reached out her long nails and restlessly picked at the mottled wall.

But after a dozen rings, the call automatically disconnected.

The girl's eyes opened wide, as if she couldn't believe that the other person would actually dare not to take her call. She didn't give up, quickly dialing the number again; as before, no one picked up.

This girl was very pretty, with apricot stone eyes, round cheeks, and a sharp little chin. She looked more like a Western doll than those cheap goods did. Innocence and charm combined in her, perfectly complementing each other. But soon, a frightening hatred climbed up her little face. Without warning, she suddenly slammed the telephone against the wall and screamed hysterically.

Just then, there was a weeping sound in the dark room, like the sobs of a small animal.

The frantic girl swiftly twisted her head, expressionlessly turning on the wall light.

The person tied up in the corner curled away from the light. Through her tears, she gave a disbelieving look—

This was the vanished Chenchen.

At this time, Chenchen's family were still waiting in a state of anxiety at the Children's Palace.

Tao Ran went out to take a phone call. When he returned, he avoided Chenchen's family and whispered something to Fei Du.

"You're saying she had an adult male accomplice?" Fei Du frowned faintly. "You mean, first they used the girl to entice Chenchen into the little park, and then the man appeared, took her unawares, and carried her off?"

"What is it?" said Tao Ran.

"No…I was just thinking there was something strange." Fei Du hoisted his unfortunate arm and turned around in place, talking quietly to himself. "Too strange—when Mr. Zhang called his daughter just after five, the phone was off. That means that the kidnapping plot was already underway. In another hour, his attempt to use the remote software to turn on Chenchen's phone failed, which shows that Chenchen was already under the criminal's control. But the criminal hadn't started to deal with follow-up arrangements yet. When the girl lost the phone on purpose, it must have been at least after six. Why?

"An adult man, even half-immobilized, definitely wouldn't need to spend an hour getting a child like Chenchen under control." Fei Du's steps paused. "And after all this was finished, the girl put the battery back into Chenchen's phone and left it on purpose for someone to take—why was that?"

Since she'd already removed the battery, taking the phone apart and dropping the pieces on her way would have been safe and convenient; the police dogs wouldn't have been able to find them.

And the explanation of temporarily turning away the police force's line of sight didn't work, because even a child would have seen enough television dramas to know that more than one police officer would be handling the case; they wouldn't be so easily distracted.

And if the person who'd picked up…or stolen the phone had happened to see her, wouldn't that increase the risk?

"Is there a possibility that kidnapping the little girl in West Ridge was a cooperative crime, but this time, for some reason, the man wasn't there, only the girl, and she had to spend more time?"

Tao Ran stared, grabbing Fei Du's shoulder. "The girl's physical abilities are limited, she can't accomplish a sadistic killing on her own…and can't complete the recording. But she knows that Chenchen's phone has remote software and that her parents will definitely try to use it to find their child. She's covertly tormenting the parents, accomplishing the same end as the recording by other means!"

Give you hope, make you search desperately, then make you lose hope.

Only she hadn't expected that the timing would be a little off; the time she delayed was longer than she'd imagined.

"If that's how it is, she couldn't have dragged away a girl about the same size as her on her own. She could only have tricked her away." From far off, Fei Du looked at the mother, again crying bitterly. "When Chenchen clearly knew that her dad would be looking for her, why would she agree to go with her?"

Tao Ran took a deep breath and quietly said, "I didn't bring my phone today, but my house is closer than the Children's Palace. Your dad may already be at school looking for you, and it would be easy to miss each other if you're both looking. You can come to my house and call him."

"The distance must have been very short, much closer than the Children's Palace. A distance a child would think was comfortable and convenient."

Tao Ran pulled over the map. "A kilometer… No, within five-hundred meters…"

There was an old residential area about to be torn down less than one intersection away from the little park's other gate.

"Wait a minute," said Tao Ran, "why do I think I've heard this address somewhere?"

Luo Wenzhou and the others had turned Su Luozhan's house upside down, primarily looking for any masculine products, searching for a trace of the mystery man.

Lang Qiao opened a drawer and turned it over, finding that among other things it contained residence certificates, ID cards, school entry notices, and other such documents and credentials. She only picked up a set of medical records and flipped through it, giving the rest of the items a rough look and quickly dropping them to one side, spreading them over the ground.

Luo Wenzhou's gaze swept over them. After a moment, as if he'd suddenly thought of something, his gaze fixed, and he crouched down and picked up the certificates of property ownership—two of them.

One of them was for this one bedroom, one living room apartment, and the other was for a building in some factory's residential quarters that had been converted to private ownership during the housing reforms. The house was older than Su Xiaolan.

"Xiao Qiao'er, check this for me," said Luo Wenzhou. "Twenty years ago, when Su Xiaolan was little, was this the address recorded for her?"

Lang Qiao didn't understand his reasons, but she instinctively complied and went to check at once. Before she'd found anything, a phone call came from the criminal policeman Luo Wenzhou had assigned to keep an eye on Xu Wenchao. "Captain Luo, we planted a listening device in Xu Wenchao's room. He just got two phone calls in a row, and he definitely heard them, but he didn't pick up—do you think he's noticed he's being watched? Oh, we've also found the phone number the calls came from. It's a landline, the address is…"

"Children's Road Trading Company Intersection, Unit 3," said Luo Wenzhou.

The surveilling policeman was surprised. "Captain Luo, how did you know?"

At the same time, Lang Qiao charged in. "Boss, when Su Xiaolan cooperated with the investigation as a victim back then, that's the address she provided in her contact information!"

Luo Wenzhou said, "Come on!"