“The attendance rate for your row was that low?” After the movie ended, Ji Mingrui turned around and saw that all the seats, which had shown as fully booked when they bought the tickets, were empty.
Especially the seats right next to Xie Lin and Chi Qing—they were all vacant.
Chi Qing, having just woken up, stood and walked toward the exit. “No idea.”
Xie Lin hadn’t paid attention to their surroundings either and offered a friendly guess, “Maybe they thought the movie was boring and left early.”
Ji Mingrui: “……”
Such a thrilling movie, and they thought it was boring?
As the crowd dispersed and they took the elevator down, there were more people than when they came up. Chi Qing and his group waited for the first two batches of people to go down. Waiting beside them for the elevator were a woman and a little girl.
The little girl was saying, “Mom, it was just there! Let’s go back and look for it!”
The little girl was relentless, and her voice was loud. Chi Qing’s temples throbbed from the noise. He heard it loud and clear: [My butterfly hair clip, that’s my favorite butterfly hair clip!]
The four words “butterfly hair clip” pierced his ears like a demonic sound.
Since the little girl kept yelling about a hair clip, Chi Qing glanced at her and noticed a tiny piece of a purple plastic wing sticking out from the little red hood hanging on her back.
Xie Lin, however, had great patience. He crouched down and chatted casually with the source of the demonic sound, “What’s wrong, little one?”
The little girl, tears shimmering in her eyes, said, “I lost something.”
Just as Xie Lin was about to ask “What did you lose?”, a hand tucked inside a sleeve used the fabric of the clothing as a shield to pluck a small purple object out of the girl’s hood through the cloth. The hand never directly touched the object the entire time.
“Your teacher should have taught you,” the owner of that hand said, “not to make a fuss in public places.”
The little girl blinked, forcing back her forming tears. Ignoring his cold tone, she happily took the hair clip. “I found it! My hair clip!”
Chi Qing let go.
Finally, some peace, he thought.
The elevator that had just gone down quickly came back up. Just before the doors closed, a hand squeezed through the gap. A man in a red and black windbreaker rushed in. He wore a baseball cap and had a camera hanging around his neck. Once he was inside, the elevator was packed completely full.
Because of the crowding, Chi Qing didn’t need any excuse this time; the back of his hand rested lightly against the edge of Xie Lin’s pinky finger.
This quietness didn’t last long. After leaving the mall, Xie Lin held the umbrella and led him to the garage just as they had come. After getting into the car, however, Xie Lin didn’t rush to drive. With his hands resting on the steering wheel, he suddenly said, “Your way of showing alcohol allergy is very unique.”
Xie Lin was still smiling as he said this, sounding as natural as if he were discussing the weather. This guy sometimes looked like a psycho, but there was no denying he usually gave off an air of noble elegance. “It seems that every time you drink, you do some unusual things.”
“For example… happening to take a walk downstairs, and happening to discover that the husband in that household has been domestic-abusing his wife long-term,” Xie Lin said. “Or the day we went looking for Yang Zhenzhen’s boyfriend. Ji Mingrui showing up at the bathhouse entrance could be explained in many ways, but you didn’t think he came because someone reported a case; instead, you were certain he came to catch someone. Need I say more? Let’s put Ren Qin’s matter aside for now. That little girl just now never said the thing she dropped was a hair clip.”
Chi Qing stared at the endless stream of traffic outside the car window. “I…”
Xie Lin, as if guessing what he was going to say, cut him off. “Even if you just happened to see it, you never confirmed with her if that was what she was looking for.”
Chi Qing had never believed he could completely conceal the fact that he could read minds without leaving a single trace, especially when he was in a poor mental state and surrounded by too much noise. Moreover, sometimes there were so many voices that he couldn’t immediately distinguish which ones came from reality and which ones came from the bottoms of people’s hearts.
“Also,” Xie Lin suddenly raised a hand and pressed his palm against Chi Qing’s, “it seems I am part of your secret.”
The rain outside grew heavier. Chi Qing had thought Xie Lin would be hard to fool, but he hadn’t expected him to remember every single detail.
Amidst the silence, the people on the street ahead suddenly scattered. Someone let out a scream, and amidst that short, sharp shriek, a black shadow plummeted from the top floor like a diving bird.
Passing vehicles were forced to a halt by the crowd scattering like startled birds and beasts.
“Bang—!”
The black shadow hit the ground and stopped moving. Crimson blood slowly seeped out from around the point of contact with the ground, and before long, it dyed the street beneath the body red.
It was the man in the red and black windbreaker.
The man’s eyes were wide open, his body sprawled in a “star” shape. His head was turned to the side, and raindrops struck his face, diluting the blood and smearing it all over his features. The camera that had hung around his neck shattered into pieces upon hitting the ground.
“What happened?”
“Someone jumped off the building!”
“Someone’s dead—Ah—”
The crowd screamed.
The sudden fall shattered the silence in the car. A phone rang, and Chi Qing answered it.
Ji Mingrui: “I just got to the underground garage, haven’t driven out yet. What’s going on outside? I heard someone fell off the building?”
Looking at the windbreaker he had just seen in the elevator, Chi Qing remembered that just ten minutes ago, this man had been standing alive right next to them.
“The deceased is a male named Zhang Feng, 31 years old, unmarried, from Yang’an. He fell from the roof and died on the spot. We are currently contacting his family.” An hour later, Ji Mingrui was flipping through documents as he walked with Xie Lin toward the morgue. “Oh, also, he graduated from Anyang Media College, and his profession is—”
The long corridor leading to the morgue was so cold it felt surreal.
Especially after pushing open the doors and walking in. The square doors of the mortuary cabinets faced the entrance directly, arranged neatly across an entire wall.
Xie Lin stopped in front of one row. As he put on rubber gloves, he said, “His profession is an entertainment reporter, or rather, a paparazzo.”
The word “paparazzo” instantly got stuck in Ji Mingrui’s throat.
He wondered if Consultant Xie had secretly peeked at the files earlier.
“Even if Jiang Yu plays favorites, he shouldn’t be this biased,” Ji Mingrui muttered. “I asked him to go back to the station and find the files, and when he found them, he actually sent them to you first.”
Xie Lin’s gaze swept over the numbers on the rows of mortuary cabinets. “He didn’t send them to me.”
Ji Mingrui: “Huh?”
“I could tell when we were in the elevator. The joints of his clothes were visibly worn out, which clearly shows he wasn’t just an ordinary photography enthusiast. Of course, if he just liked climbing trees to photograph leaves in his free time, then pretend I said nothing,” Xie Lin said. “Also, he had noticeably uneven shoulders, likely caused by constantly carrying a camera.”
“Whoosh—”
Xie Lin pulled out the second cabinet in the third row.
A corpse covered with a white cloth came into everyone’s view.
With an almost gentle movement, Xie Lin lifted the white cloth and said, “There’s also this jacket he was wearing.”
Ji Mingrui: “What’s wrong with the jacket?”
Xie Lin turned his head and called out, “Assistant.”
Chi Qing had gone to the restroom midway and returned with his arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the row of cabinets. He didn’t seem to mind that several corpses with unknown causes of death were lying inside them. His expression was even colder than the morgue. “Pull it yourself.”
There was no one else who could be such an arrogant assistant.
Seeing that he couldn’t order him around, Xie Lin backed down very quickly. “…Of course I’ll pull it myself. I was just calling you for the sake of calling you.”
Chi Qing didn’t know how he could act as if nothing had happened after saying all those things in the car.
Xie Lin: “Are you tired of standing? Want me to get you a stool to sit on?”
Chi Qing: “Standing isn’t tiring, but talking to you is.”
“…”
Since Chi Qing had just come in, Ji Mingrui was still recovering from the shock of the word “paparazzo.” Pointing at the corpse in front of them, he asked, “Can you tell what his profession was?”
Chi Qing gave the corpse a glance: “Paparazzo.”
Ji Mingrui suffered a second critical hit. “…You guys can all tell?!”
Chi Qing simply said, “I just heard it at the door.”
In truth, he had heard it while in the restroom. The morgue was so quiet that the agonizing wail from Ji Mingrui’s heart a few minutes ago had been exceptionally clear: [Why was he able to tell the victim was a paparazzo with just one glance, ahhhh?!!]
[Does this kind of person exist just to look down on us muggles?!!]
[Wuuuu (╥﹏╥)]
At the time, as Chi Qing washed his hands, he had really wanted to gag him.
Returning to the topic of the jacket, after Xie Lin unzipped it, Ji Mingrui took a deep breath and leaned in. Facing a corpse with half its skull smashed in, he couldn’t successfully focus his attention on the first glance, but managed to see clearly on the second. “This jacket… it’s just a normal windbreaker, normal windproof fabric, the kind you can get on Taobao for a couple hundred bucks. Give me five minutes on the street and I can find you an identical one.”
“The jacket is very normal, but a normal person wouldn’t sew so many pockets on the inside,” Xie Lin pulled the windbreaker open completely, revealing the square inner pockets lining the inside. “These pockets were probably where he normally stuffed mini binoculars and other items.”
Ji Mingrui had a flash of insight. “Speaking of which, the movie premiere was today, and it seemed the lead actors were going to appear. He was probably camping out here to stalk and take photos.” Even though they hadn’t seen a single trace of the lead actors when they watched the movie.
Xie Lin asked, “The forensic doctor examined the body at the scene. What did they say?”
Ji Mingrui replied, “The preliminary assessment is an accidental fall. The guardrail on the roof was loose. Someone had reported the issue before, but no one ever came to fix it. There are no signs of a struggle at the scene, and no trace of a second person. It’s highly probable he accidentally fell off.”
After Ji Mingrui finished, Xie Lin nodded to show he understood, then went to look at the pile of camera remains in a bag on the side. The shattered camera would be very difficult to piece back together completely. He examined it carefully for a long time before asking, “Is everything here?”
Ji Mingrui said, “We tried to ‘gather’ its whole corpse as best as we could. We swept the whole street anyway, so whatever landed on the street is all right here.”
[It’s pretty much a confirmed accidental fall, I wonder what Consultant Xie is still looking at.]
Chi Qing was also looking at the pile of debris. After a few glances, he answered him in his mind: He’s looking for the SD card.
This paparazzo went out with a camera, but the SD card slot was empty.
Then, he heard Ji Mingrui complain in his mind again: [The guy surnamed Chi and the guy surnamed Xie—these two can be called gods of plague. Wherever they go, people die. They aren’t the murderers, but they might as well be.]
Chi Qing: “……”
