The evidence bag lay quietly in Xie Lin’s hand, filled with tiny black fragments.
The SD card was probably lost.
There had been so many pedestrians on the street, not to mention all the passing vehicles. Any random car could have run over it, and then there would be no telling where the SD card ended up.
“There’s nothing suspicious about it, and from where he was standing, if he looked down, he’d have had a perfect angle on the private backstage area of the movie theater. He’d gone there to stake out some celebrity photos. But he had pretty bad luck. The stars didn’t even show up today. Not only did he wait for nothing, he waited himself to death too,” Ji Mingrui said while calling the precinct to report in. He was working overtime on his day off, and after circling the morgue once, he felt chilled all over. “Makes you realize paparazzi are a high-risk profession too. Let’s notify his family to come quickly and take the body back.”
Xie Lin set down the evidence bag and slowly took off the pair of rubber gloves from his hands. When he turned his head, he saw Chi Qing leaning against the morgue drawers, apparently leaning there quite happily. Of course, that happiness didn’t really show on the surface. In fact, aside from Xie Lin, no one seemed to notice that he actually looked quite relaxed right now.
Xie Lin said, “As an assistant, standing there supervising the work—looks like you’re in pretty good spirits.”
This was the first time anyone had ever said Chi Qing, whose face was gloomy no matter the occasion, looked like he was in a good mood. Even he found it strange. “Where do you see that I’m in a good mood?”
Xie Lin actually answered the question. He first leaned in close to look at him, so close that Chi Qing could feel the gaze landing near the corner of his eye as if it carried some kind of warmth. “When you’re in a bad mood, you tend to let your eyelids droop, and you like pressing the corners of your mouth together. You also stick your hands in your pockets. Right now, you’re not doing any of that. You’re just expressionless.”
Chi Qing: “……”
He wasn’t even sure he himself knew all those details.
Then Xie Lin added, almost like a sigh, “…If I’d gotten this close to you before, you’d have frowned already.”
Chi Qing said, “If I frowned, would you move farther away?”
Xie Lin said, “Regrettably, probably not.”
Xie Lin copied his posture and leaned against the side too. The morgue drawer behind him was ice-cold. “Does the morgue make you that happy?”
After a while—so long that he thought Chi Qing wasn’t going to answer at all—the person beside him suddenly said, “Don’t you think it’s very quiet here?”
Xie Lin: “……”
This time, it was Xie Lin who fell into a long silence. After a while he said, “They’re all dead people. Of course it’s quiet.”
Chi Qing expressed his agreement with that. “I never really had much chance to come to a place like this before. I didn’t expect there’d be somewhere this quiet.” The way he said it made it sound like he rather wanted to come lie down in the morgue himself.
After finishing his report to the precinct and hanging up, Ji Mingrui unexpectedly overheard that exchange. “…?”
[Big brothers.]
[What exactly are you two talking about?]
[Can’t you say something from the world of the living?]
[…And what do you mean you never had the chance? Of course you never had the chance to come to a morgue while you’re still alive!]
[Also, what normal person would think a place full of corpses is quiet?!]
Chi Qing genuinely did think it was quiet.
There was practically no sound at all—except for his longtime friend, Officer Ji, whom he genuinely wanted to throw out of the place.
After finishing his internal rant, Ji Mingrui could hardly wait to leave. “Let’s go… It’s already dark out.”
By the time Chi Qing got home, the sky had gone completely dark. Watching someone fall to their death right in front of him had left absolutely no effect on him. After showering as usual, he took a steak out of the fridge and carefully held a knife over the blood-red slab of meat, measuring where to cut.
The silver tip of the knife sank into the crimson flesh.
He suddenly remembered that moment in the morgue a little over an hour ago, when Xie Lin had leaned closer to him.
Then Xie Lin’s words started echoing in his ears again:
—It seems I’m part of your secret.
Neither of them had brought up that interrupted conversation again after it had been cut off by the sudden corpse falling from the building. Chi Qing had no idea how much Xie Lin had guessed. What Xie Lin had figured out might have gone far beyond what he’d said in the car today. After all, that person’s instincts were frighteningly sharp.
Early the next morning, as soon as Chi Qing opened his eyes, he received a message from Xie Lin:
Morning. I’m heading to Yong’an Precinct today. Help me ask my assistant whether he wants to rest at home or come with me.
“……”
Chi Qing unhesitatingly typed the two words not going, but just then, from somewhere in the building that had been quiet all night, a distorted scream suddenly erupted:
[Aaaahhh! I opened the trending list and found out my idol’s image collapsed!]
Although Chi Qing had never stirred up much splash in the entertainment industry, there was one thing he understood very well:
No one could sleep next to a fangirl in the middle of an idol scandal.
One person alone was enough to rival the whole world.
Chi Qing moved a finger and deleted the word not.
Yong’an Precinct.
Ji Mingrui had received a police call first thing in the morning. The person on the other end had claimed he wanted to kill himself.
So when Chi Qing followed behind Xie Lin through the door, amid the chaos of voices, the one sentence he just barely managed to catch from Ji Mingrui was:
“Your life has only just begun. Twenty-four years old, little brother—that’s the prime of your youth.”
Ji Mingrui had the phone tilted between his neck and shoulder, ear pressed tight against it, while his hands frantically pulled up a Baidu page to search: People who bloomed late in life.
Ji Mingrui said, “Let me tell you the story of Jiang Ziya. Don’t do anything rash, okay? You absolutely can’t lose heart over a little setback. And there’s also, uh, that one guy…”
Chi Qing: “……”
Chi Qing was so stunned by Ji Mingrui’s bizarre work state that, for a moment, he forgot all the noisy voices around him. By the time he came back to himself, the sounds filling the precinct were pouring nonstop into his ears.
He had only just lowered his eyes in irritation when the person beside him grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand out of his coat pocket.
Xie Lin slowly tugged off the glove on his hand, then covered his palm with his own.
Chi Qing: “?”
Xie Lin borrowed the excuse Chi Qing had used before and said while holding his hand, “Too many people. I’m afraid you’ll get crushed to death.”
“……”
As if he knew Chi Qing hated the noise, Xie Lin helped him avoid the crowded parts of the precinct and all the disorderly sounds.
He had come today to talk to Wu Zhibin about something, but Brother Bin happened to be out, so all he could do was sit there in Yong’an Precinct drinking tea with Assistant Chi.
Ji Mingrui, parched from talking, hung up the phone and gulped down a mouthful of water. “What are you two doing here?”
Xie Lin said, “Came to inspect your work. What about that suicidal caller—he’s not suicidal anymore?”
Ji Mingrui said, “I guess… not? In the end he said the building was too tall, and falling from it wouldn’t look very nice.”
Chi Qing: “……”
Xie Lin, on the other hand, sounded quite interested. He was the type to find all sorts of things interesting. “Do you often get calls like that every day?”
“There are other kinds too,” Ji Mingrui said. “Breakups, cheating, and a couple days ago we even had a report about rape.”
Su Xiaolan happened to walk by holding a folder and picked up the story. “Then when we got to the scene, the woman who called was crying and said the neighbor’s dog had raped their dog.”
Just as the topic got there, the phone rang again.
Ji Mingrui suddenly realized he still hadn’t gone to the bathroom, so after answering the call, he simply shoved the phone at Chi Qing and mouthed, Help me answer this, I’ll be right back.
Chi Qing held the phone to his ear with a cold expression. On the other end, an urgent male voice said, “Hello? Police?”
After saying that, the man panted heavily a couple of times, his breath hitting the receiver.
Chi Qing’s first response was three words: “Get to the point.”
The caller: “……”
“You can’t talk to people like that,” Xie Lin said, unable to keep listening. He had no choice but to do his assistant’s work for him. Still holding Chi Qing’s hand, he guided both hand and phone over to his own ear so the receiver abruptly changed direction. Then he said in a proper tone, “Hello, this is Yong’an Precinct.”
The line itself sounded perfectly fine, but his tone made it obvious he was not any kind of proper policeman.
Even when Xie Lin deliberately tried to sound a bit more upright and formal, there was still a lazy drawl in his voice. “Please don’t worry, take your time.”
The man on the other end was far too panicked to care about any of that. He lowered his voice and said, “…I think someone is trying to kill me.”
I think my house is haunted.
I think my elementary school classmate who supposedly died is actually still alive.
I think…
The police station got plenty of reports that started that way in everyday work. They’d even once gone to an old man’s “haunted” house in the middle of the night just to tighten a loose lightbulb and try to explain to him through basic science that the flickering happened because the screw was loose.
Most reports beginning with I think—nine out of ten—were just people overthinking.
But the man on the phone was trembling as he spoke. “Really, Officer, someone is trying to kill me.”
By the time Ji Mingrui returned, the call had already ended. “What happened?”
Xie Lin said, “He said he suspects someone wants to kill him. He’s on his way to the station right now—should be here in ten or fifteen minutes.”
Twenty minutes later, a short man wrapped up from head to toe walked into the station. He was bundled up so tightly that he looked like someone who’d botched plastic surgery and come to demand justice. Only after sitting down did he begin unwinding the scarf from around his head layer by layer.
“Why are you wrapped up like this?” Ji Mingrui asked from the seat opposite him.
“It makes me feel safer.”
“…Fine. Sit. Want some water?”
“Hot water is fine, thanks.”
The man had a very ordinary face—flat features, nothing remarkable. He was also wearing a windbreaker. Because he’d been so frightened on the way there, even after entering the station he kept glancing around nervously. While Ji Mingrui went to get him hot water, he noticed that there were two men sitting nearby.
And those two men were… holding hands.
He didn’t dare look too long.
He thought to himself that this police station was truly impossible to understand.
Before he turned his head back, the clasped hands of those two men moved—more precisely, the movement was one-sided.
Xie Lin hooked his finger around Chi Qing’s pinky. “Interesting. Can you guess what he does?”
Chi Qing lifted his eyes and looked over.
Ji Mingrui came back just then with the hot water. “You think someone wants to kill you. Do you have any evidence?”
“If I had evidence, would it still be a suspicion?”
“What happened that made you think someone wants to kill you?”
“Last night, downstairs outside my apartment, I noticed the motion-sensor light in the hallway by my door flicker on. No one lives across from me, and at three in the morning, it’s not like anyone should be around. So I got suspicious. As soon as I went upstairs, someone grabbed me in the stairwell and strangled me.”
The man pulled open his collar, revealing a very clear ring of red bruising around his neck. “Luckily, I found a fire extinguisher standing in the corner. I hit him with it. He lost his balance, and I managed to get away.”
By this point, Chi Qing had more or less figured it out. “He’s in the same line of work as the one from yesterday.”
Same kind of jacket, and he was getting off work at three in the morning. That narrowed down the range of professions considerably. Plus, the phone sitting by his hand was clearly the type whose main selling point was its camera.
Ji Mingrui asked, “Then who do you think wants to kill you?”
“I’ve got a lot of enemies. If you ask me to think of one right now, that’s kind of difficult,” the man said. “I’m a paparazzo. I’ve spread a lot of gossip about people, and I’ve caused quite a few celebrities to lose endorsements, get boycotted, or be shelved. Oh, and aside from celebrities, their fans hate me too. I often get razor blades and threatening letters in the mail.”
The phrase another paparazzo popped into Ji Mingrui’s head.
“…You really do have a lot of enemies.”
