Li Guangfu hadn’t even processed what he had bumped into when he saw Xie Lin come over to shield the person. It wasn’t until he was pinned down by the charging Ji Mingrui that he caught a glimpse of the man with the slightly long bangs sitting nearby.
They had seen each other once before at the police station.
Li Guangfu clearly remembered that last time, it was this exact person who recognized that the phone was his old one, which he had later given to Xiaokang.
He couldn’t actually make out the look in the man’s eyes at this moment. Behind those bottomless, pitch-black pupils, it was incredibly difficult to tell what the man was thinking. All he could see were his bright red lips, pressed slightly together.
Ji Mingrui pinned Li Guangfu onto the desk, pressing his upper body tightly against the surface and scattering the documents all over the floor. Although Ji Mingrui’s brain was sometimes slow to react, his physique was exceptional, and he suppressed the man so thoroughly that no room was left for resistance: “We didn’t look for your son last time… but I’m afraid we’ll have to find him to ask some clear questions this time.”
He raised his voice: “Jiang Yu, call his house first and ask some roundabout questions.”
Since the other party was still a child, directly interrogating him about whether he stole from the convenience store or killed the cats without concrete evidence could have a psychological impact on him.
Therefore, they generally adopted more tactful methods first.
Jiang Yu understood: “I’ll do it right away.”
Xie Lin realized Chi Qing was still staring at his hand, and only then did he let go. “Sorry, I didn’t think too much about it in the moment. Are you okay?”
This time, Chi Qing didn’t choke him with words like he usually would, such as: ‘You know better than to touch things indiscriminately too, so why did you touch me?’
Because no matter how much he rejected it, he couldn’t deny the truth—Xie Lin really had helped him just now.
The moment the man appeared, the distorted voices were cut off.
Li Guangfu’s voice—which, even when distorted, still carried a regional accent, low, eerie, and nightmarish—vanished from beside his ear. It was as if he had been suddenly yanked back to reality from another world.
He had never imagined that the unreadable trait Xie Lin possessed could be utilized in such a way.
Seeing him stay silent, Xie Lin actually felt unaccustomed to it: “You don’t have to hold it in. If you want to go wash your hands, go ahead. If you’re bothered that I touched your hand without asking first…”
Before Xie Lin could finish, he heard Chi Qing say “Thank you” before heading off to wash his hands.
Xie Lin: “What?”
Chi Qing: “I said thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Actually, I heard it the first time,” Xie Lin said. “I just wanted to hear you say it again.”
“…”
“I didn’t expect you to be somewhat reasonable occasionally,” Xie Lin added.
Chi Qing: “…”
Some people just shouldn’t be given an inch, because they only know how to take a mile.
When Chi Qing returned from washing his hands, Jiang Yu was just hanging up the phone.
“I said I was from property management, that the incidents in the residential complex recently had caused some impact on the residents, and told him not to be afraid, that if he had any clues he could provide them to us… But his reaction was very calm. He said he didn’t have any clues.”
After hanging up, Jiang Yu recalled the reaction of the boy named ‘Xiaokang’ on the call. The raspy voice unique to boys going through puberty had a very flat tone, with almost no inflection.
“There was one thing that was quite strange. He seemed very eager to hang up the phone.”
At the time, Jiang Yu hadn’t thought much of it. He had merely vaguely heard the wailing of a baby through the receiver. The crying sounded faint and distant, likely coming from a partially open door.
Jiang Yu had asked: “Is someone crying?”
The boy’s raspy voice calmly replied: “It’s nothing. The people upstairs are too noisy… so my brother is crying.”
“…He just said the upstairs was too noisy, so his brother cried.”
Based on the information gathered so far, Jiang Yu hadn’t picked up any underlying meaning in these words, but he saw Chi Qing and Xie Lin’s expressions suddenly change—
Jiang Yu vaguely sensed an unexpected shift in the situation, making his heart race: “Is there a problem with what he said?”
Xie Lin: “Give me his home address.”
Jiang Yu: “Building 12, room 5… 506.”
After giving Li Guangfu’s address, Jiang Yu watched helplessly as Xie Lin and Chi Qing, without any communication whatsoever, did the exact same thing at the exact same time. One after another, they pushed the door open and dashed outside.
On the highway.
Xie Lin drove very fast; he seemed completely unconcerned about speeding tickets and point deductions.
This was Chi Qing’s second time sitting in the passenger seat of this car, yet his relationship with Xie Lin had dramatically shifted from “opponent” to “teammate.”
He had originally planned to use other methods to subtly hint to Ji Mingrui—for example, telling him to investigate Li Guangfu’s family dynamics further. Without solid evidence, everything else was hard to articulate. But the boy’s words on the phone, coupled with the baby’s crying, forced him to think deeper.
Even though he didn’t know why Xie Lin had rushed out with him.
A driver in the adjacent lane watched a black Maybach continuously overtake cars. He muttered a complaint: “This is a highway, why are you racing? Do you have a death wish?” But when he looked up again after complaining, he couldn’t even see the car’s exhaust fumes anymore.
The night scenery on both sides of the road flew backward, rows of streetlights blurring past at a terrifying speed.
Xie Lin sped all the way from the elevated highway into the city blocks, only then being forced to slow down slightly. As he turned a corner, he said: “When a killer looks for a ‘substitute’ to practice on, rather than the ‘substitute’s’ availability, its specificity is the key factor to consider. In other words, there must be some kind of connection between the cats and the target he truly wants to commit the crime against. This is exactly the same as how victims in many serial murder cases share a common trait. In the 809 serial murder case, the victims’ only shared trait was that they were ‘beautiful.’ Afterward, it was proven that the killer indeed harbored some sort of complex toward beautiful women because of a certain person.”
As Xie Lin spoke, the taillights of the car in front shone through the windshield onto his face, casting strong contrasts of light and shadow that obscured his usually smiling, light brown eyes.
He continued: “Your thoughts should be roughly the same as mine. Do you also feel… that the physical size of a cat is very similar to that of a baby?”
“…”
Now Chi Qing knew why he had rushed out with him.
More than being surprised by Xie Lin’s sharpness, Chi Qing was astounded by this man’s thought process. If he hadn’t accidentally touched Li Guangfu’s hand, he would never have linked cats and babies together.
Someone capable of generating such a thought was no less dangerous than the incident itself.
Chi Qing didn’t have time to dwell on this issue.
Turning past the street ahead was Haimao. How they were going to act was the main priority now.
“We can’t just barge in forcefully before we know what’s happening inside,” Xie Lin, having connected all the information in an extremely short time, suddenly asked: “Can you play the role of property management?”
Chi Qing: “?”
Xie Lin: “Just say, ‘Hello, I’m from property management, I called you just now.’ Just try saying one sentence.”
“Hello,” Chi Qing, with his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets and not even lifting his eyelids, displayed an acting ability that was steadily sinking to the bottom of the entertainment industry based purely on its own merit. In a bland, monotonous tone, he said, “I am from property management.”
“…………”
Xie Lin didn’t speak further.
Chi Qing: “Is there a problem?”
“Forget it. If someone didn’t know better, they’d think you were his dad,” Xie Lin gave a fair assessment. “Leave this job to me. Just stand to the side later, as long as you don’t let him notice you, it’ll be fine.”
Chi Qing: “…”
Haimao Residential Complex.
Building 12, fifth floor.
The brick-red door was tightly shut. Old couplets were pasted beside it; since the New Year had passed a long time ago, the four corners of the couplets were already curling up.
The furniture inside was bought years ago, and the room bore heavy traces of daily life.
The apartment’s layout was two bedrooms and a living room. The living room served both as an activity area and as a study for the child to do homework.
Inside one of the rooms, in a small area manually sectioned off by a screen, lay a baby merely half a year old. The baby was currently wailing loudly. As if sensing the danger closing in on him, his entire body had turned red from crying, his tiny fists waving wildly in the air.
“Waaaah—”
The baby was crying so hard he was losing his breath.
But the boy standing silently by the crib watching him had no reaction whatsoever.
The boy was still wearing the junior high school uniform from a nearby school. Although the crib blocked everything below his waist, a sliver of silver light could faintly be seen glinting through the gaps in the wooden bars.
What the boy was gripping tightly in his hand was a brand-new serrated knife.
He looked at the baby’s delicate neck, then slowly moved his gaze down, finally settling on the baby’s violently heaving chest, right between the 2nd and 5th ribs.
He raised his wrist. As he slowly sliced into his brother’s fair, delicate flesh, blood sluggishly welled up, merging with the jagged, sharp tip of the knife.
Through this unique sensation, the boy profoundly realized that this was not a cat; this was human flesh. His wrist trembled uncontrollably with excitement. However, just as the knife tip had barely broken the skin, the doorbell rang abruptly.
He waited for a moment, but the person outside seemed to know he was home. The doorbell rang for a long time without stopping.
“Who is it?” he asked, walking to the door with the knife in hand.
“Property management,” the man’s voice outside sounded a bit casual. “We received a complaint; you guys think the upstairs is too loud.”
The boy opened the door a crack, meeting a pair of smiling eyes.
The man continued: “I just communicated with the residents upstairs. They said it might be a soundproofing issue and they’ll be mindful in the future…” The man’s voice paused slightly here. “Is your brother still crying?”
The baby’s crying was exceptionally clear.
The boy slowly tightened his grip on the knife hidden behind his back. Connecting this to the phone call from earlier, he didn’t harbor any suspicions, only feeling anxious to close the door: “He might be hungry.”
However, at the very last second as the door was closing, Xie Lin thrust his hand into the gap. His fingers instantly tensed with force, firmly holding the crack open.
At the exact moment he jammed the door, Chi Qing—who had been forced to stand aside due to his unqualified property management acting skills—directly raised his foot and kicked the door open. When he kicked the door, his hands were still stuffed in his pockets, his facial expression completely unchanged.
Looking every bit like a mob boss bringing a lackey to cause trouble, Chi Qing urged coldly after kicking the door: “Hurry up.”
Because of Chi Qing’s kick, Xie Lin had enough room to maneuver and immediately squeezed into the house.
A twelve or thirteen-year-old boy held no physical advantage against an adult male.
After being tackled to the ground, it took the boy several seconds to realize he still held a knife. But by the time he reacted, his wrist had already been firmly pinned down by Xie Lin.
Xie Lin yanked the bloodstained knife from the boy’s hand, performed a preliminary check on the baby’s injuries, and finally had the time to respond to Chi Qing’s urging from earlier: “…What I said before wasn’t accurate enough. You don’t look like his dad; you look like a debt collector.”
