A few minutes later, Ji Mingrui hung up the phone. He left the instant noodles untouched, threw on his jacket, grabbed his car keys, and rushed out the door.
Su Xiaolan was coming out of the break room when she ran into him. “What’s going on?”
Ji Mingrui: “Got a tip from a member of the public. There are people suspected to be perpetrators in the Yuting residential complex. I’m heading over now to assess the situation. According to the person who called it in, it’s two men working together. They’d been watching her from the very first day she moved into the complex and even came down specially to look her over. Most importantly, one of them stood outside her door for a very long time at three in the morning last night. The other is just as frightening — apparently he has a large number of crime scene photos at home. In short, they are extremely likely to be highly dangerous individuals.”
Su Xiaolan: “…That dangerous?”
Strange people were really becoming more and more common lately.
Ji Mingrui: “I know, right? Just hearing about it gives me the creeps.”
Ji Mingrui drove straight toward Yuting. He’d been too rushed during the call to think about it, but only now did it hit him that the name Yuting sounded very, very familiar.
He glanced at the navigation before speeding up.
“…”
Familiar didn’t even begin to cover it. He’d been to this complex several times.
Following the location the caller had given him, he found the convenience store outside the complex entrance and met with the person who had called it in — a delicate, pretty young woman wearing disposable slippers, looking like a startled rabbit.
“It’s all right, don’t be afraid, miss. We police officers will do everything in our power to ensure citizens’ personal safety. Can you tell me where the two suspects you mentioned are right now?”
Ji Mingrui drove her through the underground parking garage, looking for a space while simultaneously trying to locate her building.
Ren Qin watched him turn the steering wheel without a moment’s hesitation. “You know this place well?”
Ji Mingrui knew that making small talk would help ease her panic, so he smiled and said, “A friend of mine, and someone who’s more or less a colleague, both live in this complex.”
It didn’t take long for Ji Mingrui to realize that the two people he knew didn’t just live in the same complex as this caller — they lived in the same building. And even more absurd: when they reached the elevator and he watched the young woman press the floor button, he thought, how is it even the same floor.
As they waited for the elevator, it happened to be on its way down.
Two men stepped out. One of them, in a company uniform, was turned slightly away from them, gesturing for the other to exit first.
The other man was saying, “That last set wasn’t bad actually, it’s just the asking price was way too high, pricing it that high…”
“It’s those two units,” Ren Qin said once they’d taken the elevator up. She didn’t dare move a step away from the elevator doors and pointed from a distance. “Those two.”
“You’re sure you’ve got the right place?”
“It’s right above my own apartment. How could I have the wrong place?”
“…”
Ji Mingrui stood on the familiar floor facing the familiar door numbers and fell into a prolonged silence. Then, without further deliberation, he went straight to ring both their doorbells.
Ren Qin said worriedly, “Isn’t this a bit rash—”
Rash?
He was already being very restrained.
He hadn’t rushed all the way here in the middle of the night to pay his buddies a social call.
“The two people you’re talking about,” Ji Mingrui said, his expression complicated, “one of them always wearing gloves, the other always smiling in a way that drives people wild?” He paused, then added, “This might sound a bit absurd, but these two are actually consultants for the Criminal Investigation Division at Huanan City Public Security Bureau headquarters.”
Ren Qin: “…?”
Ren Qin blinked. She couldn’t process it for a moment. Headquarters… consultants?
10:30 PM.
Chi Qing’s door was knocked on by his buddy, and a formal statement was taken.
Ji Mingrui: “Why are you terrorizing a young woman?”
Chi Qing had no idea what he was talking about. “Can’t understand you. Speak plainly.”
“I said — you — terrorized — her!”
Chi Qing frowned. “What are you doing showing up at this hour talking nonsense?”
After sending that message to Ren Qin earlier, Chi Qing had waited a long time for a reply that never came. After much deliberation, he’d decided to make things even clearer.
He took off his gloves, found Ren Qin’s chat window again, and started typing: Every woman living alone could potentially be the next victim. I hope you’ll raise your personal safety awareness and install a…
He hadn’t finished typing “security camera” when the doorbell rang.
Ji Mingrui: “Need me to spell it out? The things you said to her — how is that not terrorizing someone?”
Chi Qing put his gloves back on and stood at the door with little patience, his eyelids drooping. He glanced across toward Ren Qin hiding by the elevator. “That counts as terrorizing her? I was just reminding her — hoping she’d install a security camera. It hasn’t been safe lately.”
“…”
Xie Lin stood to the side awaiting his own questioning. Having heard all of this, he’d more or less pieced together the whole picture. He cut in: “That said, couldn’t you have put it a little more gently?”
Chi Qing: “Was there anything wrong with what I said?”
This “suspect” had absolutely no awareness of what he’d put people through.
Ji Mingrui took back control of the situation. “Mr. Xie, the other suspect — don’t interrupt. You have your own issues. Don’t be throwing stones from a glass house. Since you did interrupt, fine — then let me ask you—”
Xie Lin had indeed been puzzled by why Ren Qin had bolted out so suddenly. Even if she’d seen the photos, that didn’t fully account for the reaction, but now that he knew Chi Qing had been laying the groundwork beforehand, everything fell into place. He cut in: “Don’t bother asking, I think I already know roughly what happened. She saw the photos, didn’t she. I went to headquarters today and brought them back — they asked me to analyze them.” As he said this he looked toward Ren Qin. “They were probably frightening to see. But you ran too fast and I couldn’t react in time to explain.”
“As for you,” Xie Lin turned to Chi Qing, picking up where Ji Mingrui’s questioning had left off, “why were you standing outside her door at three in the morning?”
It was only at this question that Chi Qing’s expression finally registered a slight flicker.
He couldn’t mention the voices he’d been hearing at night. If he absolutely had to find a plausible explanation…
Chi Qing: “Couldn’t sleep. Went to check whether she had a security camera installed at her door. Found out she didn’t, and decided to remind her.”
Xie Lin: “…” Strange as it was, the logic somehow held together.
Ji Mingrui: “…”
Ren Qin: “…”
A complete misunderstanding. Ren Qin now felt like a survivor of some catastrophe, the relief mingled with a thin layer of embarrassment. She never could have imagined that her two upstairs neighbors had that kind of profession. She retrieved her shoes and was then escorted back downstairs by all three of them.
Now that Chi Qing’s identity had shifted from “suspected psycho” to “headquarters consultant,” Ren Qin began to re-examine what he had said to her in a new light. Someone of that caliber wouldn’t have said those things to her for no reason.
And even now that the misunderstanding was cleared up, the shadow of unease and doubt that had settled over her hadn’t completely disappeared —
Gaogao’s cries in the night. The empty sugar jar. The mark on the back of her neck.
And now that she thought about it…
Hadn’t the shower gel been running out faster than usual lately?
Ren Qin was letting her thoughts spiral when she bent down to open her shoe cabinet and put her shoes away. A split second before she put them in, she heard Xie Lin ask: “Were the disposable slippers always kept on the far left side of the cabinet?”
The hand holding her shoes paused.
The shoe cabinet in the entryway was perfectly ordinary — the most standard style, the kind where you close the door and never think about it again, never clearly registering exactly where everything is placed.
Xie Lin: “If I’m remembering correctly, and you haven’t moved them, they shouldn’t be on the right side of the cabinet now. Also, there were seven pairs before. Count them.”
One, two, three…
Ren Qin counted again and again. There were only six pairs of disposable slippers in the cabinet.
“Mr. Xie, could you be… misremembering? There are only six pairs here,” Ren Qin said, staring at the slippers.
Xie Lin: “As much as I’d like to be misremembering, I’m afraid I’m not. I don’t make mistakes like that.”
In truth, if Chi Qing hadn’t been obliquely and persistently bringing up the idea that Ren Qin fit the criteria and should really install a camera, Xie Lin wouldn’t have thought to look carefully at the shoe cabinet just now. But having someone keep raising a possibility beside you made you start paying attention without realizing it. And once he did look, something really did seem off.
Ren Qin: “…”
This was a different kind of fear from being startled earlier. It was the sort of small, easily overlooked detail that, once noticed, sent dread creeping slowly through you. The fear rose in fine, dense waves.
Ren Qin stayed crouched in her shoe-changing position. She was in her own home, and yet she felt cold from head to toe.
Xie Lin spoke with a double meaning: “And the germaphobe at the door who seemed reluctant to come in — while he can seem strange at times and genuinely cannot tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one, his ‘instincts’ are unexpectedly accurate. Miss Ren, in all likelihood, someone other than you has been coming and going freely in your home.”
The Chi Qing who had just been referenced: “…”
Chi Qing felt a headache coming on.
He’d known this particular hurdle with Xie Lin would be difficult to clear.
Xie Lin was suspicious not only of someone entering the apartment, but also of him.
But Chi Qing didn’t have the time or energy to dwell on that right now. What he was thinking was: that person came during the day?
What did he come for? He usually only moves at night, and at other times Ren Qin isn’t even home.
Did he just come to look around? That seems unlikely.
And most importantly — why did he take a pair of disposable slippers?
Ji Mingrui, listening from the side and thoroughly bewildered: “So what exactly is going on now — their misunderstanding is cleared up, and there’s a new psycho who’s been breaking into her apartment?”
“Meow~”
Gaogao lay on the sofa watching all of them, letting out one faint sound.
The cat’s round eyes were amber, with the deepest ring of its pupils a dark brown, and all of them were reflected within. Perhaps the only one who could have answered their questions right now was this cat that had been living in the apartment all along — but all it could say was “meow.”
“Miss Ren,” Chi Qing said suddenly, “if it’s not too inconvenient, could you walk us through how you came to move to Huanan City? The more detail the better.”
A few minutes later.
Ren Qin sat on the sofa while Xie Lin, Chi Qing, and Ji Mingrui sat across from her. The four of them conducted an informal impromptu interview on the spot.
Gaogao jumped into her lap. She stroked him and spoke slowly. “I arrived in Huanan City at the beginning of this month. I still remember that day — the sky was a heavy gray. The train I was on pulled in in the early hours of the morning, and when I came out dragging my suitcase, most of the shops hadn’t opened yet. So I went to sit in a fast food restaurant until daylight. Since I had to go in to the shop to check in that same day, I sat there waiting and put on my makeup.”
