The cinema janitor’s regional accent filled Chi Qing’s ears. The original clamor of the surveillance room faded into the distance, and he didn’t even hear Xie Lin calling his name right beside him.
Standing up in a panic, the janitor apologized repeatedly: “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going…” She wanted to pull her hand away from Chi Qing and continue walking out.
However, Chi Qing did not let go. His cold hand clung to the back of the janitor’s hand like a snake, even increasing the pressure slightly. The man’s deep-set pupils stared intently at her: “Did you really see nothing?”
“……”
The janitor desperately wanted to say no. But looking at the person in front of her, she felt as if his pupils had pierced through her, seeing into the deepest secrets of her heart. How did he find out? Was it because she kept her head down just now, not daring to look at them when she replied, that she gave herself away?
A dense coat of cold sweat broke out across the janitor’s back: “N-No…”
Then, another hand reached horizontally from the side. Xie Lin moved the janitor’s hand away, understanding what was happening in an instant. “If there’s nothing, why is your voice shaking? Please stay a moment.”
The cinema manager chimed in from the side to help explain: “She’s just nervous, a country woman who has never seen such a big scene. Nervous.”
Yet, no matter how much the cinema manager tried to deflect, he couldn’t stop it. Not everyone could look straight into that kind of all-seeing gaze. Closing her eyes, the janitor blurted out everything she knew.
“You said there was a boy. Roughly how old was he, and how tall?” Xie Lin asked while pulling a pack of disinfectant wipes from his jacket pocket. “Which screening did you encounter him at, and do you remember what clothes he was wearing that day?”
Chi Qing didn’t even need to carry his own tissues when going out anymore, because Xie Lin’s pocket would always have them. He pulled out a disinfectant wet wipe and meticulously wiped his hands.
The janitor thought for a moment: “People come and go every day, there are too many of them. He was quite tall, looked like he was still in school… The screening should be—” At this point, the janitor caught sight of the surveillance screen behind Xie Lin. Her eyes widened as she said, “It’s this screening!”
The surveillance video was playing at multiple times the speed. On the screen behind them, the movie was already halfway through. The audience seats were hidden in sheets of darkness, with only the fluorescent light of the giant screen piercing through the blackness, faintly illuminating a few silhouettes below. In the upper right corner of the surveillance video, the time skipped forward continuously.
It was precisely the afternoon of the fire incident. Starting from 3:45 PM, the current time had fast-forwarded to 4:52 PM. There was less than half an hour left until the audience would leave.
That day, the cinema was bustling inside and out. The commotion outside stemmed from the massive fire a few blocks away. Separated by several streets, information at the cinema was blocked, and everyone was happily discussing the movie they were about to watch.
On the other side of town, the call Ji Mingrui had made to Chi Qing was finally picked up, but after a few words, he heard the sound of the line suddenly being disconnected. He was thoroughly speechless: “I wasn’t even done talking. These two really have absolutely no sense of organization or discipline.”
Su Xiaolan asked, “Where are they? I think I heard the words ‘movie theater.’ Did they go watch a movie?”
Ji Mingrui: “No, though I thought so too at first. But they said they are currently in the cinema’s surveillance room.”
Su Xiaolan pondered for a moment: “No way—do they think the killer went to the date?” She said in surprise, “The killer acts so cautiously. Why would he expose such a massive flaw? He has no reason to go to the date.”
Inside the cinema’s surveillance room, the black-and-white footage played out like a silent film.
The time continued to flow at accelerated speed. Chi Qing noticed a brief moment when the giant screen’s light intensified, illuminating an empty seat in the back row.
“Wait a moment,” Chi Qing said. “Pause it right there.”
The surveillance rolled back two seconds. There was indeed an empty seat in the corner of the second to last row—and it was the only empty seat in the entire auditorium.
To the right of the empty seat sat a stylish and exquisitely dressed woman. As the movie reached its climax, she smiled and leaned her head against the shoulder of the man next to her, who looked down and spoke to her. Clearly, this was a couple, which didn’t fit the conditions they were looking for.
Chi Qing looked to the other side and saw a thin youth sitting to the left of the empty seat. He wore a face mask, and the bright light cast on him blurred the upper half of his face, showing only that he wore a pair of gold-wired spectacles.
Xie Lin also captured this shot and said, “Zoom in on this person.”
“Is it him?” Xie Lin turned to ask the janitor.
“……” The janitor identified him carefully. Looking at the light-colored sweater the youth wore, she said, “It looks like him.”
The janitor had said she saw him crying when he came out, but she wasn’t entirely sure because she had only caught a fleeting glance. Moreover, this was clearly a very heartwarming romance film, so why would anyone be so sorrowful?
Chi Qing stared at the zoomed-in, blurry outline for a moment. The youth sat alone amidst the crowd, solitary, separated from the surrounding laughter, appearing to sit in another world altogether.
It wasn’t just Su Xiaolan, who wasn’t on the scene, who thought this way. The people in the surveillance room were also thinking: He has no reason to go to the date.
…He was such a cautious person. Aside from being constrained by his identity as a student—which, due to the school being relatively enclosed, had prevented him from realizing right away that the phone number left by the news “live broadcast” was a trap, thus exposing his identity—he had no reason to take the risk and reveal such a massive vulnerability.
Ten minutes later, the two duplicated this section of the surveillance footage, copied it onto a flash drive to bring back to the municipal bureau, and extracted the frame where the youth appeared to print it as a photograph.
When the two returned to the municipal bureau, Ji Mingrui had just finished compiling Yu Yang’s transcript. He was just about to shout, “We have a new discovery! We might be able to lock onto the killer!” when Xie Lin lightly placed a photograph in front of him.
The words at the edge of Ji Mingrui’s mouth ground to a sudden halt: “—What is this?”
“The suspect.”
“……” Ji Mingrui looked shocked, his hand holding the photograph trembling slightly. “You guys go out for one trip, and you already have a photo of the suspect?”
Xie Lin: “It’s a long story, and the photo doesn’t show his face. Let’s hear your new progress first.”
An hour ago, Yu Yang had sat exactly where Xie Lin was currently standing, receiving their questioning.
The first to question him was Su Xiaolan: “Were you close with Wang Yuan and the others? Your personality doesn’t seem like the type to hang around with them.”
The hair on Yu Yang’s forehead covered his eyes slightly. He hadn’t had the time, let alone the mood, to trim his hair recently. “We were quite close when we first started school. Our seats were next to each other, all in the back row. At that time, I was pretty lost. I felt like my sister sacrificed a lot for me, and subconsciously, I rejected that ‘sacrifice’ of hers. So my attitude toward studying wasn’t very serious back then. I deliberately didn’t listen to her, nor did I listen to the teachers. I couldn’t figure out what I actually wanted to do myself.”
But even though Yu Yang was going through a rebellious phase back then, aside from his poor attitude toward studying, he was still that sunny youth everyone liked; his core nature hadn’t changed. On the surface, he was on good terms with Wang Yuan and the others, but in reality, he played a restraining role. Whenever Wang Yuan and his group intimidated classmates, he was always the one to step up and smooth things over.
Yu Yang was also very handsome. In all fairness, if Su Xiaolan were to return to her student days, she would have a crush on a boy like him.
She scribbled down a paragraph in her notebook and then asked, “Did you ever have a dispute with anyone?”
Yu Yang: “No.”
This topic should have been bypassed, but branching out from “dispute,” it was easy to think of another concept. Thus, he spoke again—”But at that time, someone in the class liked me.”
An hour ago, Su Xiaolan had asked casually, “Who?”
An hour later, Xie Lin also spoke that exact same word: “……Who?”
Chi Qing was too lazy to join the meeting and found an empty seat to sit down nearby. Though he didn’t particularly want to participate in the conversation, he gave face by raising his eyelids to look at Ji Mingrui.
Ji Mingrui said, “Someone you probably wouldn’t think of.”
An hour ago, Yu Yang fell silent for a long time, as if wondering whether he should say it, before finally telling them three words: “Xu Xingzhou.”
Su Xiaolan’s originally smooth handwriting suddenly halted. She had subconsciously already written down the character for “Xu” following his words: “Xu… Xu Xingzhou?!”
If she remembered correctly, Xu Xingzhou was the boy who had committed suicide.
Outside the window, the sky gradually darkened. Chi Qing’s hands rested on his knees, palms joined together, unable to resist tying all this information together: A high schooler committing crimes. A photograph of a suspect at the cinema. A deceased boy who used to like Yu Yang.
These key points, unraveled from the case layer by layer, gradually pointed toward a certain answer.
Chi Qing asked, “Has Xu Xingzhou’s family background been investigated?”
Ji Mingrui replied, “Yes, we investigated. It’s just as the year head said—his parents are divorced.”
Xie Lin caught onto what Chi Qing meant: “Does he have other relatives? For instance, an older or younger brother from whom he was separated for a long time due to the divorce, with an age difference of no more than a year, and who is currently also schooling in Huanan City. If such a person exists, he is highly likely to have transferred here. Divorced families wouldn’t stay too close to each other; if both were in Huanan City, Xu Xingzhou wouldn’t have been described by the dean as a child with ‘no one to rely on’.”
Ji Mingrui was stunned: “I’ll go check right away!”
At this moment, the leader of the third team sent out regarding the news “live broadcast” also returned to report. After conducting comprehensive searches and investigations into various high schools across the city, he listed a few schools with suspicious points: “Most of the schools with poor signals are key high schools. These high schools enforce very strict management over students, basically adopting an enclosed teaching system and encouraging students to board. To prevent students from secretly playing on their phones in the dorms, they add signal jamming equipment within the campus area…”
“From what we understand currently, these three schools have the worst signals: Baolin Experimental, Qingshan High School, and…”
“Guangyuan.”
Chi Qing and Xie Lin went to pick up Su Xiaobo every day, so they were most familiar with Guangyuan.
Now that they had the photograph and the scope of the schools was essentially narrowed down, searching through the three high schools one by one to find someone matching the surveillance footage was only a matter of time. Even though the surveillance captured a blurry silhouette and the other party wore a face mask, it still exposed plenty of clues, such as height, body type, and the style of the glasses frames.
Thinking of Su Xiaobo, Chi Qing spaced out for a moment, not even noticing when Xie Lin reached out to hand a bottle of water in front of him.
Xie Lin pinched the neck of the bottle and said, “To look after you, I haven’t taken a single sip and gave it to you first. This is the last bottle. If you still don’t drink it, I will.”
Chi Qing answered with an unrelated question: “Do you still remember what Su Xiaobo said in the car that day?”
Xie Lin: “I was too busy listening to you primary schoolers bickering. Which line do you mean?”
Chi Qing recalled word for word and repeated, “‘Thankfully, this news broadcast aired before our mock exams this time, otherwise I’d still be crying over my vocabulary booklet. How could I have finished those three days of exams so happily?’”
When Chi Qing recited it, his tone was completely different from Su Xiaobo’s—it was cold, devoid of any emotion.
— “But our school’s signal is really bad. I’ve disconnected while playing games several times and even got reported by my teammates…”
— “I secretly played on my phone during class today and it got confiscated. Sigh, the teacher is really hypocritical. When the top student plays on their phone, it’s because they love learning and must be using the internet to look up information. But when I play on my phone, does it have to be a game?”
Three days of exams. Poor signal.
Xie Lin screwed the bottle cap back on: “Check Guangyuan first.”
“Guangyuan held exams for three days after the news broadcast, and the suspect made no moves for three days after the broadcast, choosing to call the police station on the fourth day saying he had the video in hand. If it wasn’t because of exams, it’s hard to explain why he chose the fourth day specifically.”
Furthermore, Guangyuan’s signal was bad. No, Xie Lin re-read those few lines from Chi Qing a few times, discovering that the most crucial part among these lines might be the phrase “the top student playing on their phone.”
Guangyuan enforced strict discipline; even during normal after-school hours, students didn’t dare to make loud noises, and the use of mobile phones was strictly prohibited during normal times. Su Xiaobo was considered an anomaly in the school, repeatedly smuggling phones without reforming—but what was up with that “top student” playing on a phone he spoke of?
Su Xiaobo was currently staying temporarily at Su Xiaolan’s house. His homework books were arranged decently across the desk, but not a single character was written on them. He sat with his legs crossed, having just finished a round of a game, when he received Su Xiaolan’s call. Picking it up, he fully demonstrated what it meant to have a guilty conscience: “Hello? Auntie? I’m doing my homework. Just finished a… ah, math problem. The calculation chose option A. Took me quite a while. Rest assured, I am really doing my homework, absolutely not playing games. If you hadn’t called me, I wouldn’t even plan on touching my phone tonight.”
Su Xiaolan was speechless: “……No one asked if you were doing your homework.”
Su Xiaobo hadn’t expected this development: “Ah?”
Su Xiaolan: “You said last time that a top student brought a phone to school and got caught too. Who is that top student?”
Right at the exact same time Su Xiaolan made this phone call to her nephew, Xu Xingzhou’s family relations records were also pulled up. The family relations showed that he also had an older brother; when his parents divorced, he and his brother were separated, each re-establishing a new family.
Looking at the information, Ji Mingrui said, “Xu Xingzhou followed his father, and his brother was assigned to his mother. His mother remarried not long after… Oh, because of the divorce, his brother doesn’t share his last name either. His brother’s last name is Shen.”
On the other end of the phone line, Su Xiaolan heard her nephew say clearly, “The top student? That’s the number one in our school’s grade ranking. His grades are so good it makes people suspect he writes the exam papers every time, an object of worship for countless people. What’s his name?” Su Xiaobo’s tone carried a teasing note, “Why do you care so much about him? Even though he has good grades and is handsome, the age gap between you guys is too big, you know, Auntie?”
Su Xiaolan’s temple throbbed: “Say. The. Name.”
“Oh, his name is Shen Xinghe.”
The voice in the phone overlapped with Ji Mingrui’s voice outside the phone.
Ji Mingrui: “……His brother’s last name is Shen, named Shen Xinghe.”
On the documentation was a student archive file.
Student Name: Shen Xinghe.
Current School of the Student: Guangyuan Middle School.
Former School of the Student: First Experimental Middle School (Qinghai City).
Affixed to the top right corner of the archive was a blue-background identification photo. The facial contour was highly similar to that blurry profile frame from the cinema. The youth’s features were elegant and enduring, and he wore a pair of gold-wired spectacles. The photo must have been taken when he transferred schools; his facial features didn’t appear overly juvenile. On the contrary, when he looked at the lens, there was a faint sense of detachment.
