The hundred-plus notes written by Yu Lan had digital backups.
After the two of them returned, they sat on the living room sofa and browsed through the photos one by one. The cat crawled at Chi Qing’s feet, its two paws clutching tightly onto the new toy Chi Qing had magnanimously bought for it—a ball of colored yarn.
Chi Qing rarely bought it toys. The big gift pack Ren Qin gave him contained several cat teasers, and after Yu Lan took the cat to raise, she bought a lot of new ones. But he didn’t always have time to play with it using a cat teaser, so he bought it a ball it could play with on its own.
Chi Qing squatted a meter away from the cat, threw the ball over, and said, “Play by yourself, don’t bother me.”
The cat happily meowed at him a few times.
Chi Qing flipped through these digital archives: “That ‘he’ indeed disappeared for a few days every now and then. Yu Lan was always worried whether she had said something wrong to make him unhappy.”
— We had a great chat yesterday, and he even sent me a photo for the first time. Why hasn’t he replied to me these past few days?
— Could something have happened to him?
— Every time I open the chat box, I want to see that line ‘The other party is typing…’
— I kind of… miss him.
……
“These notes should be connected,” Xie Lin said, his hand sliding across the tablet screen while his other arm rested on Chi Qing’s shoulder, unconsciously brushing his thumb lightly against Chi Qing’s earlobe. “Yu Lan often sent him photos, and he even replied to her with one. It might have been an ordinary street view, or maybe he reached out and snapped a photo through a nearby window, or even just a nightlight on a desk at night. But no matter what photo he sent, his attitude toward ‘Yu Yang’… isn’t that simple.”
The last paper star was yellow. Written on the brightly colored paper strip was the final sentence: We’re finally going to meet! He promised to go see a movie with me. I wonder if he’ll be startled when he sees it’s me.
Chi Qing could almost see Yu Lan’s appearance through this sentence. The girl’s eyes sparkled with light, cautiously anticipating yet fearing tomorrow’s date. She could hardly hide it anymore. She couldn’t help but want to tell him: I’m not Yu Yang, I’m Yu Yang’s older sister, and… I really like you.
Chi Qing looked at a few words in this sentence one last time: He, promised, will, go.
When they read this sentence before, they only took it as an excuse the killer used to lure Yu Lan out. But according to the analysis just now—
Chi Qing usually relied on accidentally touching others to read their minds, but at this moment, he inexplicably had an intuition. Even though the person he was trying to read remained hidden in the vast online world, with not even a true face to glimpse, he asked, “Is it possible that he really went to the cinema for the date?”
Even though it would be a very risky thing to do.
Xie Lin pondered and said, “It’s not impossible.”
Meanwhile, after school, boarding students at various high schools stayed behind for evening classes.
Inside a teaching building of a certain school, every classroom was completely quiet. Everyone buried their heads in their homework, with only occasional, extremely hushed conversations. At a seat in the very last row, a hand was hidden under the desk, holding a phone. After a long while, the fingers moved to unlock the screen. Right before the screen could dim, they tapped into an unnamed document.
The document contained large paragraphs of exported chat logs. Different from the format in a chat application, the exported document had no profile pictures or emojis, only cold text, with the sending time closely following each sentence.
-[/Image].
-[/Image].
—The weather is great today.……
–A new member has joined the family. Want to guess who it is?
–Ta-da!
–It’s a little kitten [/Image].
–But I haven’t figured out what to name it yet.…………
The fingers slid all the way down. The topic shifted from the cat to a new subject.
—It’s a re-release!
—I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out for years!
The next sentence was sent several minutes later than the two above, as if it took a long time of hesitation and deliberation to muster the courage to send:
—You’ll… accompany me to see it, right?
The person’s gaze lingered on this sentence for a very long time. So long that the phone, receiving no commands for a while, quickly dimmed and went black.
The identity of the victim in this case was unique, and the pressure to solve it grew day by day. The deceased’s parents came to the police station every few days. Although they didn’t pay enough attention to their child normally, it was still their own child who died tragically, and few families could bear it.
“My child can’t just die without answers—how on earth are you doing your jobs? It’s been so many days, and you still haven’t caught the killer!” In the hallway, a woman wept in deep grief: “He was my only child—”
Ji Mingrui felt conflicted. He wanted to step forward to offer comfort, but in the end, he took a step back, only to run into a silent Yu Yang at the other end of the corridor.
Yu Yang was not in a good state. The clothes he wore were still the same ones from the last time they met. He hadn’t gone to school for many days either. Compared to Wang Yuan’s parents, Ji Mingrui dreaded seeing Yu Yang even more. He didn’t know how to tell him: Your sister died because of you. This was simply too cruel for a child.
“You can’t just miss school,” Ji Mingrui said to Yu Yang, adjusting his emotions. “Go back to school first. We’ll notify you as soon as there’s any update.”
Yu Yang didn’t speak.
Ji Mingrui: “Don’t worry, we will definitely bring the killer to justice. There has been a breakthrough in the case now, and I believe that soon…”
Before he could finish, Yu Yang suddenly said, “The one who should have died was me, right?” Yu Yang repeated at a slow pace, “The person who was supposed to be burned to death in a fire and lie in the morgue… was me, right?”
Ji Mingrui’s first reaction was to wonder how he knew.
“I saw everything,” Yu Yang said. “I sneaked into your office. On that whiteboard, there was my photo and my name. Besides, the people who died were all my classmates from my first year of high school. There’s really no reason to kill my sister, so… he’s actually coming for me.”
Yu Yang seemed to have grown up a lot overnight.
“If he’s coming for me, then I must know who he is,” Yu Yang looked up, stating his ultimate purpose. “Can you tell me more details about the case? I want to find him.”
Ji Mingrui froze. Their team was primarily responsible for the former Class 1 of the first year at Honghai No. 6 High School. They had questioned so many people from that class, but because of Yu Lan, they had tried their best to keep it from Yu Yang, not knowing how to tell him the truth. Therefore, unless absolutely necessary, it was difficult to start from Yu Yang’s end.
Soon, they cleared the meeting room, and a few people sat across from Yu Yang to begin the questioning.
Half an hour later, in the hallway outside the meeting room, Ji Mingrui kept dialing the same phone number on his screen.
Su Xiaolan walked out of the meeting room, closed the door behind her, and asked, “Still haven’t gotten in touch?”
Ji Mingrui: “It’s ridiculous. Can these two let us know in advance before doing things? They aren’t answering their phones either, who knows where they’ve run off to again.” He was talking about the two consultants from the municipal bureau.
Ji Mingrui was waiting anxiously and complained casually, “Let’s not even mention Chi Qing—that master usually hates answering calls. Being on his contact list feels exactly the same as being blacklisted. But Xie Lin usually has a good temper, doesn’t he? What’s going on now? ‘Marry a chicken, follow a chicken; marry a dog, follow a dog’?”
“……” Realizing he had let a slip of the tongue slip out, Ji Mingrui tried to salvage it, “Uh, my language skills aren’t great, I’m misusing proverbs.”
Su Xiaolan didn’t mind at all: “What proverb did you misuse? Haven’t they already gotten together?”
Ji Mingrui: “……You know?”
Su Xiaolan rolled her eyes. “I studied criminal investigation, okay? Besides, the two of them are way too obvious.”
……True enough.
Ji Mingrui asked again, “You’re not surprised?”
Su Xiaolan: “A little at first, but looking at it from another perspective, it would be hard for either of them to be with a normal person. In a way, they’re quite a match…” Su Xiaolan reminded him, “Your call went through.”
Chi Qing’s voice came from the other end of the line, sounding exactly like he wanted to hang up right away: “What is it?”
Ji Mingrui: “Where are you guys right now?”
Chi Qing answered succinctly: “The cinema.”
Ji Mingrui had calculated everything but never expected them to be there. “What are you doing at the cinema? Watching a movie?!”
“Checking surveillance footage.”
To answer the phone, Chi Qing had specifically taken off his glove, which was why Ji Mingrui had just sensed that ‘wanting to hang up’ vibe.
He and Xie Lin were currently in the cinema’s surveillance room. Since they weren’t sure which afternoon screening the movie date was for, they had a lot of footage to review. The movie was incredibly popular, so its screening rate was staggeringly high, squeezing out the market share of other films.
While watching the surveillance footage, Xie Lin gave instructions to the cinema manager: “Bring over the staff member who was responsible for ticket checking that day, as well as the janitor who cleaned up after the audience left. I have some questions for them.”
The cinema manager looked at them as if looking at mafia bosses, behaving with utmost respect and not daring to say no: “Alright, I’ll go call them right away.”
The surveillance footage ticked by minute by minute. The time fast-forwarded to 3:45 PM, original 2D version, Auditorium 4.
The audience began entering the hall one after another fifteen minutes early. Most of them were in couples. Even if the adjacent seat was empty at first, before the movie started, the other half would arrive late and sit down in the vacant spot—after all, it was a movie that one absolutely had to watch with someone they loved.
Ten minutes after entry, the entire auditorium was packed with people.
At this moment, the cinema manager brought two women inside: “I’ve brought them. They were the ones on duty that day.”
Chi Qing looked over. The girl checking tickets was on the younger side, while the janitor was around 40 years old, dressed plainly. However, when asked if they had seen anyone strange, both shook their heads in unison: “No, nothing special happened that day… Besides, with so many people coming and going, we wouldn’t remember.”
Xie Lin hadn’t expected them to find any definitive clues either; he had just called them over on the principle of leaving no stone unturned: “Thank you for your cooperation. You can head back to work, sorry to bother you.”
The janitor kept her head down as she followed behind the ticket-checking girl. The surveillance room was full of equipment, with cables tangled everywhere. After taking two steps, she absentmindedly tripped over a bundle of wires on the floor.
Chi Qing had just hung up the phone and was about to put his glove back on. With this trip, her hand unluckily brushed lightly against Chi Qing’s bare finger.
[The boss won’t let me talk. He said if I talk too much, it will bring trouble to the cinema.]
[He instructed us to say we don’t know anything, no matter what they ask…]
[But I did see a boy that day, he was quite strange… The post-credits scene of this movie is very heartwarming. It’s clearly a healing film, and everyone was laughing at the end, but when he walked out of the auditorium, he was the only one who seemed to be crying.]
