After taking the photo, Ji Xun had no intention of showing it to its subject for appreciation. He immediately shoved the phone back into his pocket and said casually, “Captain Huo, you didn’t sleep last night and you still dare to work out today. Aren’t you afraid your heart won’t be able to take it and you’ll die suddenly?”
“I slept yesterday,” Huo Ranyin corrected him rigorously, then explained, “I was just looking at the case file and my mind felt a bit sluggish, so I came over to clear my head.”
“Right, for thirty minutes,” Ji Xun said.
Seeing that Huo Ranyin wanted to correct him again, he scooped another spoonful of cake and stuffed it into the other’s mouth, blocking his words.
Huo Ranyin ate it, but not very willingly.
His brows furrowed, and he simply let go, dropping down from the pull-up bar. “I don’t like sweets. It’s also unhealthy to consume high-sugar, high-calorie food while exercising.”
“People in good shape really are extra particular about these things.” Ji Xun was different; he had a lot of leeway right now. As he spoke, he took another large, unrestrained bite of cake. “How are things on Lian Panpan’s end?”
“Not bad. Wen Yangyang went over ten minutes ago. They’ve all calmed down.”
“What about Chen Jianying?” Ji Xun asked again. “Did he say how he met Lian Panpan?”
“They met when he was taking ID photos. He said he’d edit the photos for Lian Panpan and successfully added her on WeChat,” Huo Ranyin said.
With this kind of thing, the first step is the hardest.
Once they were friends, there were too many methods to use. Subtle influence, direct deception—one way or another, the person would be lured into the trap.
Ji Xun finished the last piece of cake in his hand.
He said thoughtfully, “I think Lian Panpan is going to give us some unexpected answers.”
…
Just after dinner, Wen Yangyang came to tell Huo Ranyin that Lian Panpan’s family had completely calmed down and the interrogation could begin.
Huo Ranyin took Wen Yangyang into the interrogation room, while Ji Xun listened in from outside.
The half-afternoon of calm was crucial for Lian Panpan. When she returned to the interrogation room, she was much more cooperative, at least answering whatever the police asked.
After the simple questions of name, age, and gender, Huo Ranyin asked, “How did you and Chen Jianying meet?”
“We met when he was taking ID photos,” Lian Panpan replied. “My tutoring center needed photos once, and he came to take them for us. That’s when we met.”
Ji Xun’s heart stirred.
From Chen Jianying’s description alone, he had thought they met at a photo studio; but according to Lian Panpan’s testimony, they had clearly met at the tutoring center.
Was this discrepancy a coincidence, or was Chen Jianying being deliberately misleading?
There were more questions, mostly about why she had slept with Chen Jianying and when they started taking explicit videos and photos. Lian Panpan’s answers were not particularly surprising.
She said she had long been fed up with her mother’s watchdog-like discipline and had been looking for a chance to do something different.
Later, the tutoring center became less strict. She met a few girls there who were into cosplay and gradually got into it herself. But cosplay was expensive, and her family was always unwilling to give her money, so she started taking out online loans.
After taking out the loans and failing to repay them on time, debt collection companies started calling her frequently. She was very agitated, and it was during that time that Chen Jianying kept chatting with her and even gave her money.
One thing led to another, and it brought them to the present.
“Did you introduce the other young girls to Chen Jianying?” Huo Ranyin asked again.
Lian Panpan visibly wavered. It was obvious that her father, Lian Dazhang, had coached her extensively on questions like this during the afternoon.
But she was still herself, with a strong sense of self and autonomy.
She did not follow Lian Dazhang’s instructions and quickly answered, “You’d find out these things with a little investigation anyway… I introduced several people to Chen Jianying, all my schoolmates. They were short on money for various reasons, and when they heard I had a way to make money, they came to do it.”
“All for fun and pleasure?” Huo Ranyin asked.
“The vast majority, yes. Take some photos, no need to show your face, no need to show your body, and you can get a new phone for striking a seductive pose for an afternoon. Or a few pretty dresses. Or a whole set of makeup. Maybe one or two were from poor families and needed money for medical treatment?”
Lian Panpan’s tone was still light. Perhaps in her eyes, these things were just that common. At 15, thinking her rebellion was a success, she hadn’t considered her private photos would be spread everywhere, nor that what started as normal photoshoots for her classmates would become more extreme with time.
“That’s what they said, anyway. Who knows if it’s true, and I don’t care. I told them, those who are willing can come, and it doesn’t matter if they’re not. There are so many people in a school, there’s always someone willing. Then for some of the ones I got along with well, I told them to go to Fuxing Education. It’s not as strict as school there, and everyone can sneak out during tutoring classes without the teachers telling their parents.”
Fuxing Education’s rules were lax.
Lian Panpan had mentioned it a second time.
For a rebellious girl like her, just how lax did it have to be for her to subconsciously and repeatedly mention “lax rules”? Ji Xun wondered from outside.
He estimated the time was about right. Sure enough, inside the interrogation room, Huo Ranyin asked the most critical question in a casual tone—the original reason they had been tailing Lian Panpan:
“Where did you get the silver nitrate you used to poison your father?”
Confusion flashed across Lian Panpan’s face.
The confusion was real and clear. She asked subconsciously:
“What silver nitrate? I didn’t poison anyone.”
Ji Xun’s back relaxed, and he leaned back against the chair.
Lian Panpan was telling the truth. She wasn’t the poisoner. The ambiguous conversation they had overheard in the hotel at dawn was just the complaint and empty talk of a rebellious girl dissatisfied with her current situation.
They were looking in the wrong direction.
In their desperate search for the truth, they were like someone looking for a white shell in a pile of white sand; they had put in all their effort only to come up with a handful of scattered sand.
Inside the interrogation room, Huo Ranyin’s brows were furrowed deeply. He also realized the problem. After a few moments of silence, he took out Xin Yongchu’s photo and handed it to Lian Panpan.
“Do you know this person?”
This was just a routine step after a lead had gone cold, but Lian Panpan looked down at the photo for a couple of seconds and suddenly said, “I know him. I saw him in my house.”
A sudden turn of events!
Stunned, Ji Xun’s spirits were lifted, as were Huo Ranyin’s, who was face-to-face with Lian Panpan.
Lian Panpan elaborated, “It was about half a month ago, right around the start of the winter vacation… I can’t remember the exact time, I just remember once I skipped tutoring and ran home to get something, and I saw him. Because my house has an electronic peephole, I never go through the front door; I usually leave a window for myself. That day I got home and was getting my things when I suddenly heard a noise. I got scared and hid in the closet, and then I saw him climb in through the unlocked window I’d left.”
“Were your parents home at that time?”
“Neither of them were,” said Lian Panpan. “It was the afternoon. I thought he was a burglar, so I didn’t pay him any mind and didn’t tell my parents he’d been there—otherwise, it would be hard to explain why I knew. But it seems he didn’t steal anything; everything at home was still there. I forgot about it later.”
With a click, the door was pushed open.
Ji Xun turned his head to see the bespectacled detective, flustered and rushing over, seemingly about to run straight into the interrogation room.
He tapped on the desk. “Your Captain Huo is in there getting important intelligence. Whatever urgent matter you have, can’t it wait until he comes out?”
The bespectacled detective stammered, “But, but, another—”
Ji Xun’s heart sank.
“Another what?”
“There’s been another poisoning case in our city. A 14-year-old boy with cerebral palsy was poisoned to death at home with milk candy!”
…
When Huo Ranyin got the news and hurried out of the interrogation room, Ji Xun was holding a file, flipping through it quickly.
“You got the news?”
“Five minutes before you.”
With cases coming one after another, the pace of their conversation quickened.
Huo Ranyin glanced at the file in Ji Xun’s hands and frowned. “The transcripts of his many colleagues from when Lian Dazhang was poisoned? What are you looking at this for?”
“Something suddenly occurred to me, and I want to verify it,” Ji Xun said, his hands not stopping. He flipped through the pages rapidly. Lian Dazhang’s law firm was a large one, and because it was the first poisoning case, the police investigation had been exhaustive, with records of interviews with almost everyone who had been around Lian Dazhang.
There were too many people. Ji Xun skimmed past the unimportant, worthless ones that were full of praise, only pausing slightly on phrases that suggested a less-than-harmonious relationship with Lian Dazhang.
“What are you looking for?” Huo Ranyin asked. “I’ll get someone to help you.”
“Not sure. Maybe something about disputes, verbal abuse, things like that. I’ll know when I see it,” Ji Xun answered vaguely. “Don’t worry about me. All the police are out running around, right? You should take your team to the crime scene immediately.”
They didn’t have much time to talk. Just after saying this, Huo Ranyin was immediately surrounded by people.
This was the second milk candy poisoning case with silver nitrate in one day. Not to mention the fury from the city bureau, the pressure from above, and the public outcry, the case itself was like a giant stone hanging over everyone’s heart.
It wasn’t just Huo Ranyin and Ji Xun working around the clock; almost all the investigators involved were pushing their time and energy to the limit, doing everything they could to investigate every piece of the case.
Tan Mingjiu had just brought the nursing home case to a stage where he confirmed the elderly Mr. Li’s son was a major suspect, possibly conspiring with Ye Wenhui to poison the old man, and was preparing for a sudden interrogation. He hadn’t caught his breath from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Wen Yangyang was already pulling him aside to discuss Xin Yongchu’s case.
The lead Lian Panpan provided gave the police a completely new line of thought:
“Lian Panpan’s family rents a place on the first floor. Every time Lian Panpan went out, she didn’t lock the window, which means Xin Yongchu could have easily and repeatedly used the window she opened to enter the room and place the poisoned milk candies in the candy dish at Lian Dazhang’s home.”
“It would also be just as easy to use the printer in Lian Panpan’s room to print the anonymous letters.”
“Combine that with some of Lian Dazhang’s candy-eating habits, and it’s entirely possible to remotely control Lian Dazhang’s poisoning…!”
Ji Xun paid no attention to their analysis and continued to flip rapidly through the file.
Many of these interviews were from colleagues who disapproved of Lian Dazhang’s way of doing things, such as, “He’s a very utilitarian person. When he wanted to buy a house, he’d cozy up to real estate agents and offer to help them with lawsuits. When his daughter needed tutoring, he’d cozy up to the head of an education institution, saying he could help anytime. The classic opportunist who won’t lift a finger without a profit.”
Some were gossip about his married life, like, “He secretly invested in and bought a commercial property on his own, with only his name on it, and didn’t tell his wife. He’s probably guarding against divorce and doesn’t want his assets to be divided.”
Others were about his recent work habits, such as, “He got a promotion. The hardworking image of him throwing himself into work and ignoring his family is gone. He leaves work on time, knows how to take vacations for himself, and then squeezes his junior staff. Double standards!”
Until a line of text suddenly jumped into his sight. The moment he saw it, he knew:
This is what I was looking for!
The transcript came from a colleague of Lian Dazhang’s named Feng Qisi.
He was not only Lian Dazhang’s colleague but also his university alumnus, though a year senior.
They had recently competed for the position of senior partner at Zhongqi Law Firm, and this one-year-older senior had narrowly lost to Lian Dazhang. In his statement, he had said sourly:
“Lian Dazhang has been an ungrateful white-eyed wolf since his student days. Back in his third year, he betrayed the dean who had cultivated him before his own wings were even fully grown. Now that he’s a senior partner, he’ll betray Zhongqi Law Firm sooner or later.”
At the time, considering the obvious conflict between the two, the police had invested some manpower and resources into investigating Feng Qisi, but the investigation ultimately showed he had neither the time nor opportunity to commit the poisoning. This testimony was then filed away into the vast sea of case files.
Until Ji Xun unearthed it again.
Ji Xun closed the file and turned to leave.
He took two steps before his arm was grabbed.
Huo Ranyin caught him.
The crowd gathered around Huo Ranyin was like a river, and their words were a ceaseless, surging tide, with waves crashing one after another, threatening to submerge a person. In the midst of this tide, Huo Ranyin reached out his arm, the sturdiest anchor, connecting himself to Ji Xun.
Ji Xun met Huo Ranyin’s gaze.
At this moment, countless matters awaited Huo’s decision, his approval, his leadership.
Yet he was still focused on Ji Xun.
The hand touched his for only a moment, then quickly let go.
“Stay in touch,” Huo Ranyin said. “Speed dial 1.”
Ji Xun let out a stifled laugh. “Alright, alright, don’t worry. I’ll stay in touch. I’ll contact you, my great captain, as soon as I have a lead.”
