Having found the victim, the first priority was still to contact the victim’s family.
Fu Baoxin’s parents were waiting inside the police station for news. Upon hearing Zhao Wu’s call, they were overjoyed and rushed to the scene in less than half an hour.
At this time, the ambulance also arrived. With the nurse’s help, the girl groggily woke up. Her baby-fat face, aside from confusion about her current situation, still carried a faint flush from her deep sleep. Such peacefulness contrasted sharply with the parents who rushed in crying and laughing, evoking a rather poignant feeling.
“Student Fu.” Seeing it was about time, Police Captain Zhao Wu stepped forward to interrupt, “Do you remember what happened before you fell asleep?”
This 16-year-old high school sophomore was exactly the female in the photo Meng Fushan sent.
She indeed looked quite naive and cute, but could just being naive and cute make her a target for kidnappers? More importantly, during their previous chat with Zhao Wu, Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin had also learned some of this family’s background. They understood why the parents had called the police within just fifteen minutes of failing to pick up their daughter:
Three years ago, in the summer of 2013, the couple’s eldest daughter, Fu Baoling, also a high school sophomore at the time, mysteriously disappeared during a summer camp. The police tracked the case for a long time, but there was neither news nor a body. Since then, Fu Baoling became an indelible name on the missing persons list.
As for how Fu Baoling and Fu Baoxin, two girls three years apart, were born back when the family planning policy was strictly implemented… it wasn’t exactly a novel or rare story.
At the time, the couple held traditional views. Having had a daughter for their firstborn, they wanted to try for a second child to have a son, so as to have an heir to carry on the family line. But they were civil servants. While ordinary people violating the policy only had to pay a fine, civil servants violating the policy could lose their jobs. Thus, they left their eldest daughter in the countryside to be raised by her grandparents. During holidays, the eldest daughter wasn’t even allowed to call them Mom and Dad, but only Uncle and Auntie.
Unfortunately, even with all that, the second child was still a girl. Afterward, the couple finally gave up and stopped trying for a boy. However, due to various reasons, the eldest daughter continued to be raised in the countryside and didn’t return to their side until middle school.
Having not spent much time with her growing up, a rift was inevitable. After the daughter returned, she was very independent and not very affectionate with the couple, and the couple were also quite neglectful of her… And so, the disappearance happened during the summer camp, leaving the couple in agonizing grief.
With this precedent, the couple naturally paid extreme attention to Fu Baoxin, to the point of suffocatingly close surveillance.
For example, at noon today, when the tire of Fu Baoxin’s father’s car broke down, he insisted on accompanying his daughter to the residential gate, calling a taxi to send her to school, and then worked non-stop in the afternoon to get the car fixed so he could pick her up on time.
In fact, after today’s kidnapping incident, one couldn’t say the couple did anything wrong. Rather, they could be praised for learning from their past mistakes and preventing a tragedy from repeating itself.
“After school, I went to the ‘Xia Ming’ milk tea shop and bought a cup of milk tea…”
Accompanied by her parents, Fu Baoxin recounted what happened before she passed out.
“But the milk tea was knocked over by an uncle walking by…”
“An uncle?” Ji Xun interjected, “Do you remember what he looked like?”
“I don’t remember.” Fu Baoxin was a typical well-behaved, obedient girl. She answered whatever people asked her, which was likely inextricably linked to her parents’ excessive intervention and protection on her life’s path. “He was wearing a jacket, a scarf, and a helmet. He was riding an electric scooter and knocked over my milk tea. But after knocking it over, he immediately stopped, apologized to me, and went to line up to buy a new cup of milk tea to compensate me. After I took two sips… I seemed to get a bit dizzy. I don’t know what happened after that. When I woke up again, you were all here.”
Fu Baoxin’s father added: “Parking is not allowed at the school gate, so I usually wait for her in a parking space nearby about ten minutes in advance, and then pick her up at six o’clock sharp. She didn’t come today and didn’t send a message, so I went to her classroom to check. When no one was there, I called the police.”
Without a doubt, that electric scooter rider wearing a helmet was Meng Fushan.
But right now, the most critical issue was probably not the person who kidnapped Fu Baoxin, but why the daughter of the couple standing in front of them had been chosen as a target time and time again.
“Have you offended anyone in your work or daily life?” Zhao Wu asked directly.
The couple shook their heads blankly.
Fu Baoxin’s family background wasn’t bad, but it was only not bad.
Because of the second-child incident in the past, the couple had been criticized and disciplined within their organization, and had not been promoted for many years. Although they were civil servants, they were just grassroots civil servants. They held absolutely no real power, making it hard to imagine them offending someone enough to have their daughter kidnapped.
“Think harder,” Zhao Wu could only say. “Has there been anything unusual in your daily lives? Were there any signs before your two daughters were kidnapped…”
“…Wait, wait!” The wife suddenly cried out in shock. “Before Baoling disappeared, it seems she also had a physical examination!”
“Physical examination?” Ji Xun and the others looked at each other.
“Right, right,” the husband also realized. Neither of them had the habit of getting frequent health checkups, so the two checkups for their two daughters had left a rather deep impression on them. “Before Baoling disappeared, their school organized a full-body physical examination. And just a week before Baoxin was kidnapped, we also just had a family physical examination together. Does this count as something unusual?”
Of course it did!
Not only did it count, but the phrase “physical examination” caused Ji Xun to associate it with many more things.
Xi Yongchuan in Ning City’s healthcare hospital.
The sentence Meng Fushan had once said to him—”Xiao Yu’s heart hasn’t been very good since she was little, right?”…
And his hint that Tang Jinglong was not simple—Tang Jinglong’s wife was the vice president of Sunshine Hospital, the very hospital that offered a program where if the wife had prenatal checkups, the husband got a free physical exam…
And Tang Jinglong used to be an organ donation coordinator.
The organ trafficking supply chain he and Meng Fushan had speculated about based on Xu Xinran’s strange behavior during interrogation and Lu Xiaoen’s case—
Countless intricately linked threads suddenly seemed to close in on this one point, weaving together to sketch a rough answer…
The organ trafficking supply chain truly existed.
Just as Tang Jinglong had found Lu Ping in advance to be a scapegoat, could the scapegoat business, also centered around hospitals, be a closely related branch of this organ trafficking racket?
Criminals always wanted to absolve themselves.
And Ji Yu’s heart might also be related to these people and events.
Had he really missed something back then?
Ji Yu’s face appeared before Ji Xun’s eyes once again, floating in the dimly lit corridor of the hotel.
He hadn’t been troubled by this illusion for a while, and he thought he had somewhat moved past it… But in this instant, when he realized that Meng Fushan hadn’t just been a paranoid doing useless work all along, he saw his sister clearly once again.
Only his sister’s face floated there, like a pale mask dripping blood and tears, bobbing up and down in an invisible river of sin, a thousand unspoken words congealed beneath that familiar face.
She called out:
…Brother…
Ji Xun shivered.
His body even swayed a bit, and then someone firmly supported him; Huo Ranyin gripped him tightly.
“Are you two alright?” Zhao Wu was alert, his gaze immediately shifting over as he asked worriedly.
“I’m fine.” The one who answered was Ji Xun.
Yes, he was fine.
This was the first time he saw his sister’s face and didn’t immediately have the urge to die.
His body was still trembling.
This time, the trembling wasn’t from guilt; it was from anger.
The person was found, but due to the special nature of the situation, they still had to go to the police station. They needed to record the details of both kidnappings thoroughly and clearly, adding a sliver of possibility to finding Fu Baoling.
Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin also followed them back to the police station. They too wanted to hear more details. But at the police station, they saw an unexpected person—Luo Sui!
Why was Luo Sui here?
When they left Lao Hu’s house in the afternoon, hadn’t she made up her mind not to call the police?
“What’s going on with her?” Ji Xun asked Zhao Wu. “I know her; I just saw her this afternoon.”
Luo Sui’s current state was visibly poor to the naked eye.
If her sorrow in the afternoon made her look like a ghost wandering under the shadows of daylight, then at night, she looked like a ghost about to dissipate. Perhaps if the wind blew a little stronger or the light shone a little more majestically, she would be blown away and extinguished.
Zhao Wu had been running around with Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin all afternoon and didn’t know what was going on either. He called over the police officer on duty to ask, and the situation wasn’t complicated.
“She said she was in a bad mood in the evening, so she took a taxi to the abandoned port to clear her head. But while resting inside a shipping container at the port, someone locked the container from the outside with an iron chain. Fortunately, someone passed by, rescued her in time, and helped her call the police.” The officer on duty explained the situation in a few words. “The good Samaritan who called the police left first. Earlier, because of the kidnapping case, the city issued a bulletin to all branch units for coordinated investigation. The branch office thought she was the girl we were looking for and quickly sent her over… We didn’t expect it to be a mix-up. But since she’s already here, there’s no reason to send her back right away. We’re currently checking the surveillance near that area and have already circled a few suspects, but the surveillance equipment around there is old, and the faces captured are all just pixels. Old Dan is fixing them right now.”
The ‘fixing’ here wasn’t a computer technology restoration, but rather Old Dan’s unique skill.
He was an excellent sketch artist. Even if the person in the surveillance footage was blurred to the point of just being pixels, he could extract a face from the pixels that looked almost exactly like the suspect and draw it out.
This unique skill was renowned far and wide and had helped solve quite a few difficult cases.
“Her complexion doesn’t look too good.” Luo Sui was sitting on a lounge chair in the office, and Zhao Wu peered at her from outside the door. “Was she injured when she was locked inside?”
“Probably not. But her emotions are very unstable. Less than 10 minutes after entering the police station, she started clamoring to leave. At that time, her statement wasn’t even finished, so how could we let her go…” the officer said. “We were afraid she would wander out in a trance and encounter danger again, so we had her stay here for a while.”
Zhao Wu said nothing more.
The group of them stood outside for quite a while. Inside, the distressed Luo Sui finally noticed their presence. When Ji Xun’s gaze collided with Luo Sui’s, he clearly saw the woman freeze for a moment, and a pleading light suddenly appeared in her dim eyes. This ray of pleading light seemed to give Luo Sui a bit more spirit.
She was pleading with him.
Ji Xun made an accurate judgment.
But pleading for what? She was already inside the police station, clearly out of danger, with nothing left to be afraid of…
However, combining this with Luo Sui’s various behaviors, a bold but logical thought appeared in Ji Xun’s mind.
She was pleading… pleading with him to save her and get her out of the police station!
Strange.
Why was Luo Sui so afraid of the police station?
Ji Xun temporarily suppressed his doubts and asked, “Can I take a look at the suspects circled from the surveillance?”
There was no reason he couldn’t.
The police officer turned around, lit up the computer screen, and let Ji Xun see the suspects who passed by the cameras during that time period.
Although Luo Sui could no longer remember the exact minute or second, the green taxi that carried her was quite conspicuous in the surveillance footage. Using it as a temporal marker, the police listed the suspicious vehicles and people that followed shortly after.
When the blurry cameras captured faces, they were indeed so blurred they were just pixels.
As pixelated figures passed by the camera one by one, suddenly, Ji Xun said, “Stop.”
The screen paused. Naturally, the face on the screen was still a mass of pixels, but that didn’t matter. The instant Ji Xun saw the person, he recognized the other’s clothing.
“I saw this person this afternoon,” Ji Xun said. “He appeared beside Luo Sui.”
The Qin City police’s spirits were lifted. Zhao Wu immediately asked, “Who is he?”
“I don’t know him,” Ji Xun said, but he didn’t disappoint the Qin City police. He continued, “But I know someone who does, and I know someone who can find him.”
Hu Yuan, who was still in Qin City handling Lao Hu’s funeral, arrived at the Qin City police station after receiving a call from the police.
Since everyone was colleagues, they didn’t use an interrogation room. The Qin City police were even quite considerate, allowing the Ning City people to communicate among themselves first.
Mainly, it was Ji Xun relaying what Luo Sui had encountered to Hu Yuan.
“The suspect is the young man who met with you this afternoon. Ji Xun saw you together, and I trust his eyes; he wouldn’t misidentify someone.” Huo Ranyin asked straightforwardly, “Who is he?”
“He…” Hu Yuan paused. This momentary pause seemed as though she was thinking, thinking about how to answer this question.
“He looks thirty percent similar to you,” Ji Xun suddenly spoke up. “Younger than you. He suddenly appeared with an anxious look on his face right when you were about to divide the inheritance. You are 28 years old this year; Lao Hu is 80 years old. You have a bad relationship with your brother and mother. So…”
Having laid out all the clues, Ji Xun asked again:
“Who is he? And who, exactly, are you to Lao Hu?”
