Sun Fujing. Of course, it was him. It could only be him.
In the Tang Zhixue case from 22 years ago, the two “murderers” with distinct features only appeared in his testimony and later in the words of another witness. The effect was the same: to guide the police’s investigation towards the “murderers'” characteristics.
Human traffickers who abduct women and children have a relative consensus not to target those with distinct physical features. Why would two murderers who committed such a major crime have no disguise? They neither killed Sun nor stole any money, as if they had made a detour of over half an hour just to let Sun Fujing see their strange clothes.
The incomprehensible logic becomes perfectly clear when viewed from another angle.
If you change Sun Fujing’s position from a victim to an accomplice of the murderers, all the logic aligns with how things developed.
After Zhao and Qian killed Tang Zhixue that night, they never went to the Sun residence at all, so naturally, there were no witnesses along the way. They were at the construction site, and their coworkers could vouch for their presence in the latter half of the evening. Thus, they naturally had a reasonable alibi for 9:30 PM, the “second crime scene time” fabricated by Sun Fujing.
The reason Sun Fujing was able to deceive the police 22 years ago and become a blind spot in the investigation of the Yi’an County police, who were initially ‘not fooled by physical characteristics,’ was due to the misery of him borrowing money from everyone everywhere and his subsequent unfortunate bankruptcy.
Yes, everyone in Yi’an County knew he was crying out for money. How could such a person be the murderer?
Neither Yuan Yue, who was driving, nor Huo Ranyin, on the other end of the video call, was surprised by this answer. In fact, when the DNA test identified Zhao Yuanliang and Qian Shumao as the murderers, Sun Fujing’s involvement was already obvious.
The people at the construction site at 9:30 weren’t lying, so the only one who could be lying was Sun Fujing.
Yuan Yue was only troubled by one thing: “I went to test Sun Fujing today. He is very cautious. And he made a lot of preparations; his answers were flawless.”
He briefly summarized his conversation with Sun that evening, then continued, “So, although we know he’s a major suspect, after 22 years, we lack strong evidence to arrest him. Now that both Zhao and Qian are dead, we don’t even have human witnesses. We’ve already sent people to question the witness who testified to seeing someone with long hair near the bus back then to get a new statement, but even if it’s finally proven that he took money to lie, we still can’t complete the chain of evidence to accuse Sun Fujing of murder.”
“That’s to be expected. Sun Fujing is not a simple man. It would be strange if he weren’t cautious, not the other way around,” Ji Xun said. “Have you checked the unfinished building that was under construction back then?”
“You mean…” Yuan Yue was thoughtful.
“I went there, the time I met with Kong Shuiqi. While waiting for him, I experimented by kicking a basketball against the wall. I noticed then that the walls seemed particularly thin, and the soundproofing wasn’t very good,” Ji Xun nodded towards Huo Ranyin. “Captain Huo must have felt it too when he came to find me.”
“Yes, I could hear your conversation very clearly from a great distance.”
“Ah—so you were hiding there and eavesdropping for that long? I thought our hearts were connected and you timed your arrival perfectly.”
“It was already good enough that I could guess you’d go check the unfinished building on the way. Ji Xun, I’m a police officer, not a magician.”
“Tsk—”
Yuan Yue, beside them, naturally filtered out the pointless banter. He pondered and responded, “It’s not impossible. It was a school building. If there were shoddy work, corner-cutting, or corruption during construction, Tang Zhixue, as an accountant, would have had a high probability of discovering discrepancies in the ledgers. And he had a habit of helping poor students; he would have been the most intolerant of this kind of thing that affects children’s education.”
Yuan Yue spoke rather conservatively, but Ji Xun was much more unrestrained: “Yeah, yeah, he probably prepared some materials and evidence for a report or something. For a government project like this, if it involved some collusion, one fell swoop could take down Sun Fujing and some others. That would be a huge deal. Sun Fujing’s motive for murder is more than sufficient.”
“Ji Xun, don’t speculate without evidence,” Huo Ranyin warned him.
Ji Xun put his hands together and bowed to the screen. “My mistake. I’ll listen to Teacher Huo.”
Yuan Yue added, “That building remained unfinished ever since. With no one taking over the project, no one would know if there were problems with it. If Sun Fujing had tampered with the finances from the beginning, he could have used this incident to get away with it. Anyway, no matter how big the financial hole, he could just blame it on wages and the subsequent break in the funding chain.”
“We can’t convict him of murder, but the unfinished school building is still there. If we work hard to investigate the corruption charge, we can at least find out something,” Ji Xun said.
At this point, the direction for the next stage of the investigation was clear.
Yuan Yue slammed on the brakes, stopping the car.
They had arrived at their destination.
Just as Ji Xun got out of the car with the late-night snack, he heard Yuan Yue say from inside, “I’m going back to Yi’an County now to investigate the unfinished building at No. 1 High School and put Sun Fujing under surveillance to prevent him from fleeing. Thanks, Ji Xun. I’ll cook for you at your place after the case is over.”
After speaking, without waiting for Ji Xun’s reply, he stepped on the gas again, and the car sped away with a gust of cold wind.
Ji Xun stood alone by the street for a moment, holding the snack, and heard Huo Ranyin’s voice.
The voice came from two places at once.
In reality.
And from his phone.
Only then did Ji Xun realize that their video call was still connected.
“Captain Yuan left?”
“Uh-huh.” Ji Xun held up the skewers in his hand and ended the video call at the same time. “Here, your late-night snack.”
“You really brought it for me?” Huo Ranyin smiled for a rare moment, a fleeting one, like a shooting star in the night sky. He took the snack from Ji Xun’s hand and walked with him along the curb.
Although Yuan Yue was gone, their topic of conversation remained the same, still revolving around the case.
“Tan Mingjiu just sent a new piece of information.”
“About Fuxing Education?” Ji Xun said.
“More accurately, about Chen Jianying,” Huo Ranyin said. “The technical investigation unit discovered that Chen Jianying had multiple large-sum Bitcoin transactions.”
“Hmm, is it just simple crypto trading, or is someone engaging in illegal activities and using this method to hide the traces of financial transactions?”
“It should be the latter,” Huo Ranyin said. “Because the withdrawal frequency is very regular. We’ve compared it with the trend curves of recent years; even when the price of Bitcoin was in a slump, Chen Jianying would still withdraw.”
“So you think there’s a group behind Chen Jianying. The case with Lian Panpan and her classmates is probably not an isolated incident. The whole process, from luring her with her interest in cosplay to online loans to explicit photos, is a mature industrial chain. Chen Jianying packages these photos and videos and uploads them to a fixed superior, who then regularly transfers money to him,” Ji Xun stated the final conclusion without any hesitation. “And this superior is Fuxing Education.”
Huo Ranyin added, “Lian Panpan’s experience is very typical. In that tutoring center, even a parent like Xu Shuoguo had to resort to tailing students to report it, which shows that the management is usually very strict. they wouldn’t just let in a photographer of unknown background. In other words, Chen Jianying has connections with people at this educational institution. The children in the institution are young, mostly not yet mentally mature, and their spare time is already taken up by their parents. People from Fuxing Education select from these children, send girls to talk to them, chat about topics they’re interested in, and then have people like Chen Jianying establish contact with them. The strictly managed tutoring center suddenly becomes one where it’s very easy to skip class. They have enough time to spend on their interests, and step by step, they walk into the abyss. And once they become part of the industrial chain, they will unwittingly influence their own classmates, bringing more people in.”
Ji Xun put his hands in his pockets and said sarcastically, “Education makes money fast, but not as fast as selling the privacy of young girls. As expected of Sun Fujing, a man capable of murder and robbery. He seems like the type to do this kind of thing. But given his personality, he probably has a bird-brained fool like Qian Shumao do the dirty work again, while he himself hides in the background, claiming ignorance. Didn’t Yuan Yue say it? He doesn’t touch his wife’s education business.”
“Don’t you think that, with the addition of this matter, your reasoning from just now has a small flaw?” Huo Ranyin said.
“Ha, impossible,” Ji Xun retorted without thinking.
Huo Ranyin said calmly, “Qian Shumao was the manager of Fuxing Education. For so many years, he has been colluding with Sun Fujing, doing this dirty business. He had plenty of opportunities to get a handle on Sun Fujing. Since both of them held evidence of each other’s crimes, their relationship should have been a dangerous balance. Why was Sun Fujing so sure he had Qian Shumao under control, and why did Qian Shumao have to kill at this specific time? Ji Xun, I agree with Qian Shumao’s ‘hide a leaf in the forest’ scheme, but I’m afraid we still don’t fully understand his motive.”
“…”
Ji Xun glanced at Huo Ranyin. This time, he didn’t refute and began to think again.
Huo Ranyin didn’t wait for Ji Xun to speak again. He raised his hand and hailed a taxi.
The car stopped.
Huo Ranyin opened the back door and invited Ji Xun to get in.
“?” Ji Xun’s train of thought was cut off. “Captain Huo, what do you mean?”
“The case has reached this point. You can retire with honor.”
“You’re kicking me—”
Ji Xun’s mouth was covered by Huo Ranyin’s hand.
Huo Ranyin: “Be civil.”
Ji Xun’s eyelids drooped, his gaze falling on the hand covering his face. Then his eyes flowed like water towards Huo Ranyin.
Only then did Huo Ranyin realize his gesture was too intimate. He was about to pull his hand back when it was held down.
Ji Xun raised his hand, his fingertips tapping twice on Huo Ranyin’s knuckles, probing the hollows and hooking into them. He didn’t use much force, not in a hurry to pull Huo Ranyin’s hand away, just pulling it slightly to give himself room to speak.
“You don’t like that last idiom? Let’s change it.”
Ji Xun let out a breath.
“You’re burning the bridge after crossing it.”
The captured hand was half-on, half-off. The warm breath the other exhaled seemed to have grown wings, stubbornly crashing against his palm.
Huo Ranyin relaxed his hand.
Instantly, the crashing sensation in his palm disappeared.
At that moment, he felt a flash of regret. He pressed his fingertips together again, but unfortunately, a missed opportunity is a missed opportunity. He only touched the tail of that warm breath, which hooked around his fingertips and slipped away.
“…Haven’t you always been unwilling to participate in cases?” Huo Ranyin focused his mind. “Now I’m sending you home to sleep, letting you rest up and concentrate on your writing, so you can submit your manuscript early. Shouldn’t that be exactly what you want?”
“Not wanting to participate and not being allowed to participate are two different concepts,” Ji Xun corrected.
“But in terms of results, the two are the same,” Huo Ranyin said.
“Hey, that’s going too far.”
Aren’t you the one going too far? Huo Ranyin thought.
“First, you squeeze my intelligence dry, then you kick me out at a critical moment, and finally, you even try to rush my manuscript?”
Ji Xun leaned in. At first glance, their heights seemed similar, but when they got close, he was still a sliver taller than Huo Ranyin. He held Huo Ranyin’s hand and whispered in his ear:
“Is Captain Huo trying to infiltrate and control every aspect of my life, from personal to professional? It feels so—dan—ger—ous—”
The taxi honked.
The two men by the roadside were taking too long; even the taxi driver couldn’t wait any longer.
A man and a woman dilly-dallying was understandable, but what were two grown men trying to stall for?
Huo Ranyin pulled his hand out of Ji Xun’s grasp and said no more. He pushed Ji Xun into the car. As he was about to stand up, he noticed one side of Ji Xun’s collar was flipped up, so he reached out and smoothed it down.
“Have a good sleep.”
He said, closed the car door, and watched the car drive away.
But the car only drove one block, turned a corner, and then sped back to the other side of the road.
Ji Xun jumped out of the car.
He ran across the road and grabbed the shoulders of Huo Ranyin, who was still standing in the same spot. He spoke rapidly, his passion for life seemingly ignited in that instant, every word he spoke like a leaping flame:
“You’re not wrong, and I’m not wrong either. If we combine them, it’s—”
“Qian Shumao worked like an ox for Sun Fujing for many years and did have evidence of Sun Fujing’s crimes, but he never dared to bring it out because he was always wary of Sun Fujing’s power. The reason he chose to act now was that he was forced into a corner. He knew Sun Fujing was going to push him out to take the blame, so he resorted to this desperate measure of murder in an attempt to save himself—and this ‘power’ is probably more than just the Fuxing Education we thought.”
“I have a premonition,” Ji Xun said. “If you dig deeper into this Sun Fujing line, there will be more surprises. You need to be extra careful with your surveillance and arrest operations.”
Huo Ranyin’s gaze lingered on Ji Xun’s face for a long time.
At times like this, Ji Xun always had a different kind of light, a light he had been searching for for a long time.
His thoughts felt as if they were stuck in honey, struggling for a while in the sticky sweetness before breaking free into clarity. “It makes sense, but right now there isn’t enough…”
“Evidence, evidence, evidence,” Ji Xun scoffed impatiently. “Evidence is your police business. Is it illegal for me to state a premonition? I’m just giving you a heads-up since you’re about to go arrest him, to avoid—”
“To avoid making the same mistake as you and being buried alive in a pit dug by the criminal?” Huo Ranyin scoffed back.
“…” Ji Xun was amazed. “You really hold a grudge.”
“Don’t worry,” Huo Ranyin said nonchalantly. “I’m not the only one in charge of the surveillance and arrest operation, nor am I going alone. These operational plans will be repeatedly scrutinized…”
He glanced at Ji Xun again.
“But I will record your opinion and continue to investigate, to dig deeper into Sun Fujing. Now, can you go home and get a good night’s sleep?”
Ji Xun replied with just three words.
“You’re so annoying.”
It was late at night, and the family was asleep.
In the unlit living room, Sun Fujing held three lit incense sticks, their tips a dark red glow, flickering in the darkness like a person’s breath.
He held the incense, bowed three times to the Mazu statue, and inserted the sticks into the incense burner.
Then he opened the statue and took something out from within it.
The clouds parted, and the moon revealed a cat’s-eye-like sinister glint in the sky. That glint pierced through the window, illuminating his old hands and the cold, hard piece of iron in them.
A gun.
He held the gun and let out a sigh like a snort, like a carnivorous beast snorting.
