When this extremely important clue was confirmed by Wang Guiyu and transmitted via signal to the Second Detachment’s office, everyone’s spirits were instantly reinvigorated. Hanging up the phone, Tan Mingjiu could not contain his inner excitement and leaped straight up:
“That bastard Zheng Xuewang really hid it deep! But as the saying goes, while the demon rises one foot, the Dao rises ten—we still managed to dig up the critical time node! No doubt about it, the killer is definitely that bastard!”
“…Wait.” Ji Xun frowned at this moment. “You just said a critical time node.”
“Yeah, April 1st,” Tan Mingjiu said. “The date Zheng Xuejun fell from the building. To a doctor, true life probably isn’t just a shell that can still breathe, but a conscious existence. Zheng Xuejun lost consciousness the day he fell, so to Zheng Xuewang, his brother’s true time of death wasn’t June 1st, but April 1st. The reason he chose June 1st to pay his respects all these years was partly to go with the crowd, and partly to set up a smokescreen for everyone else. If we hadn’t uncovered the letters he hid, we would have been fooled by him. He really went through painstaking efforts for many years just to kill Chen Jiashu.”
Reaching this point in his analysis, Tan Mingjiu didn’t stop and continued to add:
“Although there is currently no direct evidence proving that Chen Jiashu stood behind those street thugs from the brawl back then—which we need to keep investigating—we might as well make a bold assumption. Even now, Chen Jiashu isn’t a completely clean and innocent legitimate businessman, let alone twenty years ago when regulations were loose. Fighting for territory and fighting for business were everyday occurrences. I think Zheng Xuejun got caught up in that kind of incident and was accidentally killed by Chen Jiashu’s people. That’s why, after all these years, Zheng Xuewang resolutely gave up a highly promising job to lie low by Chen Jiashu’s side, waiting for the opportunity to murder him!”
Having finished this coherent chain of analysis, Tan Mingjiu concluded with a final, forceful statement:
“A doctor with professional knowledge really is different. With just a clever little trick, he actually succeeded in his murder!”
Tan Mingjiu’s words made sense, fitting together the vast majority of the logic regarding the grievance between Zheng Xuewang and Chen Jiashu in this case.
Except for one problem.
Ji Xun’s spine, which had straightened because of Wang Guiyu’s words, gradually slumped again during Tan Mingjiu’s statement, seemingly proving the slight hesitation in his heart. He said, “But Chen Jiashu’s death wasn’t on April 1st; he died on March 26th.”
This discrepancy left the reasoning, which was originally as solid as a pyramid, missing a supporting corner.
“Old Ji, are you just arguing for the sake of arguing now?” Tan Mingjiu blanked for a moment.
“What do you mean arguing? I’m raising this question seriously.”
“I think, if possible, Zheng Xuewang definitely wanted to kill Chen Jiashu precisely on April 1st,” Tan Mingjiu replied after some thought. “But murder isn’t like going to the market to buy a head of cabbage, where you get it exactly at the time you want. In murder cases, there’s a significant gap between the perpetrator’s intentions and the final outcome for the vast majority of them… haven’t we seen this all the time when handling cases?”
“Planning to kill someone on April 1st, but due to various reasons, killing them on March 31st or April 2nd—that’s called a discrepancy between plan and outcome.”
Huo Ranyin finally spoke, hitting the nail on the head.
“Using a bottle of medication mixed with poison to kill randomly, making it possible for Chen Jiashu to die on any day between the 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st, or the 1st—that’s not called a gap between plan and execution.”
“This is called a fundamental flaw in the plan,” Ji Xun frowned and took over the conversation. “If Zheng Xuewang really wanted Chen Jiashu to die on April 1st, he shouldn’t have chosen this method of murder. It’s like climbing a tree to catch a fish—how could he ever achieve it?”
“You guys do have a point…” Tan Mingjiu admitted. “But Old Ji, Captain Huo, what if Zheng Xuewang couldn’t think of a better way to kill him? After all, Zheng Xuewang is just a doctor. Although he wants to avenge his brother, he hasn’t received any special training, nor is he some kind of psychotic serial killer. This current plan, which admittedly seems to have a gap between his intended goal, might just be the closest thing to revenge he could come up with while maximizing his own safety?”
It couldn’t be said that this possibility didn’t exist.
Zheng Xuewang showed a deep nature, but his external presentation did, after all, contain aspects of his true character.
From his behavior, he really didn’t seem like the type of person to risk everything on a single venture…
Ji Xun fell into contemplation for a moment.
“Focus the ongoing investigation heavily on Zheng Xuewang,” Huo Ranyin instructed.
No one objected to this decision.
At present, Zheng Xuewang was the visible and tangible breakthrough in this case, and they definitely had to keep investigating until the truth came to light.
Since the current primary direction was determined, the first task was naturally to “invite” Zheng Xuewang to the police station first.
Beyond that, the police didn’t sit idle either. They began investigating Zheng Xuewang’s recent movements and spending records. From the time he left the hospital until now, it was only two months, fully calculated. Such a huge expense of 320,000 yuan in such a short period was also something worth pondering.
This kind of investigation was not complicated.
The police quickly managed to fish something up.
“Another phone was seized from Zheng Xuewang’s home, which had an unregistered SIM card. The card was in close contact with a certain number. Two months ago, this number would connect late at night every single time, at least three times a week, and for at least half an hour each time.”
“What about the past two months?” Ji Xun asked.
“In the past two months, the frequency of contact remained unchanged, but the timing and duration of the calls altered,” said the detective with glasses who checked the phone numbers, pushing his spectacles up. “The contact over the past two months shifted to the daytime, usually around meal times, and the communication time was very short, wrapping up the topic in about five minutes. Cross-referencing his dashcam records, he would drive out shortly after finishing the phone calls.”
“Woooo,” Tan Mingjiu whistled. “My guess is he went to see a lover.”
He had already guessed this quite a few times today. However, life consists of two major parts—family and work. For a thirty-seven-year-old male who possessed a certain social status and money, unless he had some physical or mental condition, one or two female figures should accompany him one way or another.
“The identity of this lover might not be very reputable,” Tan Mingjiu analyzed with sound reasoning. “She’s either a married woman or a sex worker; otherwise, there would be no need for Zheng Xuewang to be so secretive and afraid to make it public.”
While the police officers in the office analyzed with perfect logic, the interrogation experts in the questioning room were no slackers either.
Once these pieces of evidence were laid out in front of Zheng Xuewang, without needing much prompting, Zheng Xuewang confessed on his own, his expression quite calm: “It’s an employment relationship. I give her a certain amount of living allowance, and she maintains a relationship with me.”
“Keeping her,” Wen Yangyang spat from behind the one-way glass.
“What is her name? Aside from maintaining a relationship with you, does she maintain relationships with other people?” the interrogation expert asked again.
“She did before; now… maybe she does too,” Zheng Xuewang said.
“Soliciting prostitution!” Wen Yangyang had already turned from disdainful to furious. “Look at how matter-of-fact he is about it!”
“Soliciting prostitution doesn’t cost 320,000 yuan,” Ji Xun crossed his arms, tapping his fingers against his sleeve. His gaze casually drifted over Zheng Xuewang. Right now, the members of the Second Detachment were all gathered outside the interrogation room, waiting to cross-reference Zheng Xuewang’s testimony with his tracking logs. “Judging from the dashcam, where else did he go over these past two months?”
“During the first month, he went on a self-driving tour around the periphery. In the second month, he patronized several nightclubs and mahjong parlors in the city, and there are also records of him going to shopping malls and movie theaters. Oh, and he also went to Juanshan Fishery twice to fish.”
Huo Ranyin communicated the situation to the interrogator inside, who straight up told Zheng Xuewang to write down his spending records.
Tan Mingjiu couldn’t help but raise his head and muttered in a low voice, “Why does that sound a bit familiar…”
This murmur was too quiet; the others, who were entirely focused on Zheng Xuewang inside the interrogation room, didn’t hear it.
Zheng Xuewang had already written down his expenses for these two months item by item.
The expenses at legitimate establishments like the hotels on the self-driving tour, nightclubs, malls, and movie theaters could not be faked. The police could verify all of these; it would just require a certain amount of time and manpower.
Adding up the amounts Zheng Xuewang wrote down, it came out to just over 150,000 yuan.
There was still a gap of 150,000 yuan remaining. The interrogator questioned Zheng Xuewang, who replied, “Part of it was daily expenses, and part was spent buying bags for Xiao Jin.”
“Are you eating Australian lobsters every single day to have that much in daily expenses?!” Without raising his head, the interrogator told Zheng Xuewang to write down Xiao Jin’s contact details.
“It was mostly buying bags…” Zheng Xuewang said sheepishly. After stalling for a brief moment, he wrote down a number, which happened to be the frequently contacted number on the unregistered SIM card the police had investigated.
But after contacting the owner of the number, Zheng Xuewang’s lie was easily exposed.
“Bags?” Xiao Jin responded with a bit of restraint upon learning the call was from the police station, but her tone carried an underlying disdain for Zheng Xuewang. “They’re all fake, street-stall goods, terrible knockoffs. He gave me six in total, and the total value is at most two to three thousand yuan. Keeping them at home just takes up space, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Did he know these were fakes?” Wen Yangyang, who was communicating with Xiao Jin, couldn’t help but ask.
“He knew perfectly well,” Xiao Jin replied. “Nobody actually thinks that designer bags bought for three or four hundred yuan under the dim lights of a night market or online are genuine, right? But I never told him that I knew the bags I received were fake.”
“Why?” Wen Yangyang asked, puzzled.
“Officer, men have their dignity,” Xiao Jin burst out laughing. “If you want to keep him around, you have to preserve a tiny bit of dignity for him, even if that dignity is as flimsy as window paper… People who are too straight-laced just won’t understand this kind of thing.”
“…”
Wen Yangyang went silent on her microphone and looked at the others.
Ever since Ji Xun realized that Zheng Xuewang’s actual expenses did not match the amount he accounted for, he hadn’t paid much attention to the conversation between Wen Yangyang and Xiao Jin.
Huo Ranyin didn’t care either.
Although Xiao Jin had also broken the law—vice and anti-prostitution crimes were handled by a specialized police task force, so it didn’t require much of their attention.
The focus of their discussion remained squarely on Zheng Xuewang.
“Why lie?” Ji Xun tilted his head to speak with Huo Ranyin.
“To cover up some things that are hard to talk about,” Huo Ranyin followed up.
“Where could such a massive amount of money run off to in such a short span of time?”
“There is a place to spend money that can be very directly inferred through Zheng Xuewang’s travel logs,” Huo Ranyin said.
“Exactly…” Ji Xun murmured thoughtfully. “Zheng Xuewang, a doctor, with this kind of habit… Does it remind you of someone we once crossed paths with, but who slipped away from us like a fish?”
“Of course.”
“???” Wen Yangyang’s eyes spun in circles. What kind of riddles were these two big shots speaking in?
“Damn!” At this moment, Tan Mingjiu, who had been racked with thought earlier, finally slapped his thigh. “I remember now, Juanshan! Xu Xinran has been loving to go fishing at Juanshan lately! It’s also bizarre—Ning City has so many places to fish, how did these two happen to gather at the same place to fish?”
“!!!” Wen Yangyang finally caught on. “Are you saying that Zheng Xuewang’s missing money went down the drain from gambling? Ah, that makes sense. Looking at his recent tracks, he frequently slips in and out of mahjong parlors; he clearly has a bit of a gambling addiction!”
Although similarities had already been found between Zheng Xuewang and Xu Xinran, after receiving circumstantial proof of a connection between the two from Tan Mingjiu’s mouth, Ji Xun’s heart still rocked back and forth, as if placed on a crescent moon boat.
Huo Ranyin directly ordered Tan Mingjiu to bring over Xu Xinran’s investigation file.
He looked over the file for a while, then picked up the comms to coordinate the current key points with the interrogator—did Zheng Xuewang know Xu Xinran, what exactly did Zheng Xuewang and Xu Xinran do at Juanshan, and was there an underground casino at Juanshan that the police hadn’t discovered, which explained why the two gambling-addicted doctors repeatedly headed there?
These were all highly important clues.
But after standing on the spot for a moment, Ji Xun still found it somewhat difficult to calm his mind.
Placing his hands in his pockets, he stood up silently and left the outer room of the interrogation area, walking all the way out to the police station’s small backyard garden.
Moving away from the brightly lit, crowded indoors, the air seemed to clear up as a result.
Leaning against the parallel bars in the garden, Ji Xun looked up at the sky.
The sky had grown dark again.
Day by day, from light to dark, the golden-yellow moon hung askew at the corner of the sky, on the verge of falling but not yet doing so, carrying a sort of exhausted helplessness.
This helpless light shone into Ji Xun’s eyes, illuminating his brain which was desperately striving to untangle the threads.
The time spent thinking felt both slow and fast.
After thinking for an unknown length of time, Huo Ranyin’s voice drifted over from beside him: “Ji Xun.”
Ji Xun startled slightly, turned his head, and saw Huo Ranyin walking out of the corridor: “Is there a result from the interrogation side?”
“Zheng Xuewang answered very readily after realizing he could no longer hide it.”
“A wise man submits to circumstances,” Ji Xun commented.
“He said his trips to Juanshan for fishing were indeed for the purpose of gambling.”
“Where is the casino?”
“He doesn’t know,” Huo Ranyin said. “Every time, they first take the fish they caught into a restaurant, and then board a vehicle in the restaurant’s backyard. The vehicle’s cabin is entirely enclosed, making it impossible to see the road outside. After about half an hour, the vehicle stops, and before getting off, they are blindfolded—then they feel like they are taking an elevator, eventually arriving at the casino. Once the gambling is finished, they return to the restaurant the exact same way, and then part ways.”
For this kind of underground casino, no amount of caution was too much if they wanted to evade police tracking. Analyzing it from Zheng Xuewang’s itinerary, he had only been there twice, so what he could understand was probably limited to what was stated above.
Some details might still be missing, but these details might not necessarily have been left out intentionally by Zheng Xuewang—the human brain is vast yet tiny, with countless memory sparks nesting and flickering across the hippocampus, constantly overlaying the old with the new. Evoking Zheng Xuewang’s memory of the finer details would still require some time and technique.
“Does Zheng Xuewang know Xu Xinran?” Ji Xun asked.
“He says he doesn’t,” Huo Ranyin replied.
“Do you think he’s telling the truth or lying?”
“It should be true,” Huo Ranyin pondered. “When shown a pile of photos, his eyes registered no fluctuations whatsoever as they swept across Xu Xinran’s picture. Besides, investigations into both Xu Xinran and Zheng Xuewang yielded no traces of communication between the two.”
“Judging from the tracking logs, Zheng Xuewang only suddenly developed a tendency for large-scale gambling within this past month…” Ji Xun said slowly. “What happened during this month to cause such a massive change in him?”
“Perhaps it’s stress,” Huo Ranyin said flatly. “If he really was the one who killed the man, he must be harboring extremely heavy psychological pressure in his heart.”
That was one possibility, Ji Xun thought. But there was also another possibility.
“There is another possibility.” As if able to peer into Ji Xun’s mind, Huo Ranyin’s voice almost overlapped with Ji Xun’s thoughts. “If it’s not internal, then it’s an external factor. Someone is luring Zheng Xuewang—luring him into gambling, and luring him to draw closer to Xu Xinran.”
—Yes.
—Ning City was so large, with so many casinos and mahjong parlors, big and small, near and far, easily numbering twenty or thirty. How did Zheng Xuewang and Xu Xinran both happen to choose the exact same one?
They shared far too many similarities.
Both were doctors, both performed illegal operations, and both gambled.
Making the exact same choice could not simply be chalked up to coincidence. It felt more like there was a hand, a person, quietly drawing them closer from the shadows.
Was this hand, this person, the deceased Chen Jiashu?
Or…
Amidst his chaotic thoughts, a figure—a familiar figure—gradually emerged.
Could it be him?
Could it be…
“Who did you think of?” Huo Ranyin asked.
Ji Xun turned his head and met Huo Ranyin’s perceptive gaze. He remained silent.
The corner of Huo Ranyin’s mouth hooked up slightly—not in a smile, but as an anchor of rationality. “Ji Xun, Meng Fushan saved us once. I harbor no ill intent toward him. If you believe there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Meng Fushan and that he didn’t kill anyone, then you should precisely let the police investigate him—to investigate him is to protect him.”
“You got one thing wrong,” Ji Xun said suddenly.
“Meng Fushan doesn’t need police protection? The police will ruin his plans?” Huo Ranyin tilted his head, displaying a touch of impatience.
“Not that. Earlier at Chen Jiashu’s villa, you said I trust both you and him. I trust too many people.”
“Mhm—”
“I do indeed trust you,” Ji Xun said. “I’ve never once thought that your case would yield an outcome I didn’t want… but Meng Fushan…”
Huo Ranyin actually wasn’t wrong.
He and Meng Fushan had spent a long time together and gone through quite a lot, but they had also been separated for many years, during which they independently experienced entirely different things.
He acted as though he trusted Meng Fushan implicitly; his behavior perfectly mirrored his thoughts. Rationally, he did firmly believe in Meng Fushan.
But in his heart… deep down… in his subconscious… only now did he suddenly realize with a jolt… he didn’t actually trust Meng Fushan all that much.
The killer couldn’t possibly be Meng Fushan.
Ji Xun still held his initial view, especially after discovering Zheng Xuewang’s motive for murder.
But crossing the line didn’t just manifest in the form of physically executing a murder.
Since Meng Fushan’s shadow had also appeared during the investigation into Zheng Xuewang, could it be possible… that Meng Fushan knew everything, witnessed everything, yet still turned a blind eye to Zheng Xuewang’s murderous intent and Chen Jiashu’s death?
Or even worse, could it be that Meng Fushan catalyzed and lured Zheng Xuewang forward?
In his chaotic mind, the fog shrouding the blurry figure was swept away in a single breath.
Meng Fushan’s brow was sharp, and he looked at Ji Xun coldly.
Agitated and uneasy, Ji Xun was unwilling to look at Meng Fushan. He turned instead to look at Huo Ranyin beside him. The moment Huo Ranyin’s gaze met Ji Xun’s, he instantly looked away as if nothing had happened.
“I don’t need this kind of special treatment.”
The wind softened his voice.
His voice and his words were entirely at odds.
_
Author’s Note:
Yin-yin: Saying no but meaning yes (tsundere).
