Although the sounds inside the General Bureau were clearly chaotic and overlapping, with people talking about all kinds of things, because that sentence from the buzz-cut man was so shocking, Chi Qing couldn’t hear anything else for a moment. It was as if someone were crouching by his ear, repeating that sentence over and over:
[I’ve been peeping on her all this time.]
The buzz-cut man’s voice was low, flowing slowly past Chi Qing’s ear like the murmur of a silent, crazed, sick voyeur.
After a long while, Chi Qing kept his hands in his pockets and, as he stood up, still said to Ji Mingrui, “Did you check the crime scene thoroughly?”
Chi Qing had always been strong at deduction to begin with, and he had also helped a lot in the cat-killing case last time, so Ji Mingrui didn’t find it strange that he was suddenly asking about the case. “We checked it roughly. Didn’t find any problems.”
Chi Qing asked, “No abnormalities at all?”
Ji Mingrui: “?”
Ji Mingrui: “Why are you asking that?”
“Nothing,” Chi Qing said. “Just suddenly thought of a story I read before.”
“A story?”
Even when telling a horror story, Chi Qing remained expressionless, his tone completely flat. “It was about a man who started by sending harassment messages, and in the end installed a pinhole camera in the girl’s home to watch her every move.”
Ji Mingrui listened to the little story very seriously. He thought for a moment and said, “What you said does make sense. I’ve seen similar cases at the station. People who habitually pester someone can easily become more and more twisted, and gradually become dissatisfied with only harassing them online. They’ll choose more methods to ‘get close’ to the other person… Hey, where are you going?”
Ji Mingrui had only gotten halfway through his own muttering when he looked up and found that Chi Qing had already started walking out.
The man in black gloves pushed open the glass door at the end of the corridor.
“It’s too noisy here,” Chi Qing narrowed his eyes. The buzzing in his ears still hadn’t stopped. “I’m leaving.”
When Ji Mingrui relayed this line of thinking to the people in the observation room, the room fell silent for a moment. The silence made Ji Mingrui uneasy, and he suddenly became unsure whether he shouldn’t have casually voiced that guess. “Uh, I was just saying it casually. Maybe I overthought it… I’ve been overthinking a lot these past few days. Brother Bin, are you about to scold me again for having no brain? Well then, I’ll head back to the station first. Just pretend I never—”
He didn’t get to finish “came here.”
Wu Zhibin patted Ji Mingrui on the shoulder and said with satisfaction, “Kid, you’ve improved today!”
Ji Mingrui stared at him, mouth open. “—Huh?”
“We were analyzing the same thing too,” Wu Zhibin said. He was usually so irritated by this group of rookies that his liver hurt, and today he had finally heard something decent come out of one of their mouths, so he didn’t hold back his praise at all. “Xue Mei mentioned it on her alt Weibo account too—she said she always felt like someone was watching her.”
Wu Zhibin concluded, “Keep this guy detained for now. You two, come with me. Let’s check the crime scene one more time. Maybe there was some detail we missed.”
Ji Mingrui scratched the back of his head, his ears turning red from being praised, and immediately said, “Got it, Brother Bin!”
Only Xie Lin remained leaning against the console without speaking.
He had just finished scrolling through Xue Mei’s alt Weibo. The first post the girl had ever made was three years ago, when she had just graduated from university. Full of hope, she had written on that account: Graduated! Work hard, live well, keep it up.
Xie Lin stared at that simple line for a long time before finally closing Weibo.
Then he switched back to WeChat and opened a certain someone’s chat window.
The message he had sent still hadn’t been answered.
He lifted his eyes and looked out into the corridor. The bench that had been occupied a moment ago was now empty.
The redness in Ji Mingrui’s ears hadn’t faded yet when he heard Xie Lin ask him, “How did you come up with that guess just now?”
Ji Mingrui answered honestly, “I’ve done so much mediation work at the station, I’ve come across similar cases. Of course, my friend just happened to tell me a story too…”
Chi Qing passed through the corridor and took the elevator down, only to be stopped at the entrance of the General Bureau.
A young detective was standing guard by the main doors. He stretched out an arm in front of Chi Qing, stopping him. “You’re Mr. Chi Qing, right?”
Chi Qing’s expression was poor. He lifted his eyelids to look at him.
The young detective said, “Sorry, you can’t leave.”
“Reason,” Chi Qing said. “You don’t have the authority to stop me.”
How would the young detective know the reason? He had just gotten a call from above telling him to stop the person and not let him leave.
There were several elevators in the lobby, with direct elevators to different floors. As Chi Qing and the young detective were speaking, the elevator facing the main doors opened.
It came straight down from the third-floor interrogation rooms.
So Chi Qing clearly heard a voice from behind him say, “I told him to stop you.”
After saying that, Xie Lin waved a hand, signaling that the young detective who had helped stop him could leave.
So the young detective gave them a slight nod and returned to his post.
Xie Lin rested one hand on Chi Qing’s shoulder, pushed open the main doors with the other, and led him forward. “Come on. Let’s go take a look at the crime scene together.”
The moment the door opened, another layer of noise flooded into Chi Qing’s ears.
The extra layer came from the pedestrians and vehicles on the road, but that wasn’t what was giving Chi Qing the biggest headache right now. Compared to the noise, the person beside him was much more of a headache.
Chi Qing said, “Why should I go?” What did it have to do with him?
Xie Lin didn’t remove the hand on his shoulder. After thinking for a moment, he said, “If you really insist on asking why, maybe it’s because you told that story pretty well.”
“…”
“You can choose not to go,” Xie Lin added. “If you don’t, we’ll go back to the third-floor interrogation room and have another chat about that story you just happened to suddenly think of.”
When Xie Lin said this, he was looking at him. He looked no different from usual, but Chi Qing knew that two coincidences in a row were enough to make him suspicious.
Ji Mingrui, who had come out of the elevator a beat later behind Wu Zhibin, stared at the hand on Chi Qing’s shoulder and deeply suspected he was living inside a dream. “…”
He stood there in a daze and asked, “Brother Bin, did you see where Consultant Xie put his hand?”
Wu Zhibin said, “I saw it. On your friend’s shoulder.”
“Why?”
“…”
So he hadn’t seen wrong after all.
This was actually real?
Ji Mingrui refused to believe it. He blinked hard, but the scene he saw was still the same. He also noticed that Xie Lin’s hand had already been resting there for over ten seconds, yet Chi Qing still hadn’t told him to get lost.
…When had these two gotten so close?
Ji Mingrui thought to himself that this was even more baffling than the two cases where no one yet knew how the killer had entered the victims’ homes.
Chi Qing was forcibly dragged to the crime scene. The site had been sealed off by the police the moment it was discovered, and no one was allowed to enter without permission. Even if they did go in, they had to strictly follow procedures and not damage the scene.
This was Chi Qing’s first time stepping inside.
Xue Mei’s room still carried a heavy sense of daily life. If not for the old freezer that had once held her body and the police seals posted around the room, one might have thought the girl had only gone away on a trip and would soon return.
The scene had already been examined many times.
This time, the focus was on “privacy,” on hidden corners and the walls.
“If a pinhole camera had been removed, it might leave traces,” Xie Lin analyzed. “But I don’t think the probability of a camera is high. If there had been a camera, then it likely would have recorded the process of Xue Mei being killed, and he would have known about her death on the very same day. But he was clearly completely unaware of it during the month after Xue Mei was stuffed into the freezer.”
Chi Qing happened to be looking at the wall. His gaze landed on an oval mark, and he pointed at it. “What’s that?”
After carefully chiseling away the section of wall where the newer-colored building material had been patched in, they finally exposed the wall’s original state. Because the material filling that section was recently added, the whole chunk came loose the moment they struck it.
A finger-width hole was revealed in the wall.
Wu Zhibin leaned in to look. The other side was the buzz-cut man’s bedroom. Through the hole, he could clearly see the bed, the wastebasket, and the pile of dirty clothes strewn across the bed.
Chi Qing had long known that everyone had secrets in their hearts.
Once the truth was exposed, the buzz-cut man sat in the interrogation room with his head lowered and admitted it. “Yes… yes, I really was… I really was peeping on her all this time.”
“There had already been a hole in that wall originally. I wasn’t even the first tenant in that room. When I moved in, that part of the wall was already dented in a little. The landlord said a previous tenant had wanted to hang up posters or photos, so they hammered a nail into it themselves.”
“After I moved in, I used that nail to hang clothes. Later when the nail came loose, part of the wall surface came off with it…”
“That’s how the hole appeared,” the buzz-cut man explained anxiously. “I didn’t deliberately drill a hole in the wall.”
This time, only two people were left in the interrogation room: Wu Zhibin and Ji Mingrui.
Chi Qing had been brought into the observation room by Xie Lin. The two of them sat there, listening in real time to the next room through the amplifier and the glass wall in front of them.
Chi Qing sat beside Xie Lin. “Going to the crime scene was one thing. Why still can’t I leave now?”
Xie Lin was right in front of the control console. He turned the speaker volume down a little and said, “Wanted to hear your opinion. And then we can head back together later.”
Hearing his opinion was false; testing him was true.
Chi Qing thought to himself that he shouldn’t have said that extra sentence to Ji Mingrui just now.
Xie Lin really was testing him.
Passing by, then suddenly thinking of a related story—this person kept throwing himself at the case. There was no way Xie Lin wouldn’t think more about it.
But as for suspicion, it still wasn’t enough.
Chi Qing had no motive, nor was there any evidence pointing at him. Other than the fact that he had previously lived somewhat close to the crime scene, there was nothing concretely suspicious about him.
“Looking at you, your condition hasn’t been very good all day,” Xie Lin said. He picked up a bottle of mineral water from the side and handed it to him. “Back at the crime scene, when Brother Bin got close to the wall, you took several steps back… Did you run into too many people outside today?”
Chi Qing took the water and gave an “Mm,” not denying it.
After he finished drinking, Xie Lin very naturally took the bottle back from his hand and placed it on the table for him. But he didn’t give Chi Qing a chance to pull his hand back. One hand gripped Chi Qing’s wrist; after putting the water down, the other hand directly reached to take off the glove on Chi Qing’s hand.
Chi Qing’s black glove was suddenly stripped off. “…What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing,” Xie Lin said. He was getting more and more practiced at holding his hand now. “Your condition is still serious. It needs treatment.”
Reason told Chi Qing that he should pull his hand back.
But after being assailed by noise for an entire day, the sudden quiet in his ears was too hard to resist.
All the noise inside the General Bureau vanished at once. The only thing left was Wu Zhibin’s voice coming through the speaker from the other side of the glass wall:
“Maybe you didn’t intentionally make that hole, but what about the person? How long were you peeping on Xue Mei?”
Chi Qing’s finger joints shifted slightly inside Xie Lin’s palm. In the end, he gave up resisting.
The buzz-cut man was silent for a moment, then said, “From the first day she moved in.”
“I had originally planned to find someone to fix it. I’d already contacted the landlord and asked him to help me find a repairman. But in those exact days, the tenant next door changed…”
The new tenant was Xue Mei. On the first day she moved in, the buzz-cut man took one look at her, and after that, as if possessed, he stuffed something else into the hole and messaged the landlord saying he must have seen it wrong, that nothing needed fixing.
Then that very night, he carefully turned off every light-emitting fixture in his bedroom and couldn’t help moving his eye close to the small hole.
“What did you see?” Wu Zhibin asked.
“I saw her…” the buzz-cut man stammered. “She was changing clothes.”
Peeping was the kind of thing that became addictive very easily. Once he had a way to spy on another person’s life, that hole was like it had some kind of magic to it, irresistibly drawing him in.
“I couldn’t help it. After that, I secretly watched her every day.”
The buzz-cut man pressed tightly against the wall, staring through the hole without blinking as he watched Xue Mei come home from work, talk to her friends on the phone, order takeout, eat, watch dramas, and remove her makeup. He watched what she looked like bare-faced, and he began to feel that there was some intimate bond between the two of them, something private that belonged only to them.
After a while, he saw her changing into new clothes in front of her mirror. Then one night, he watched her put on that beautiful new outfit and bring a man home.
The two entered one after another.
Full of jealousy, he watched her and her boyfriend get intimate.
Wu Zhibin cut him off and took out a photo of Xue Mei’s boyfriend, carefully confirming it with him. “Was the man she brought home this person?”
The man in the photo had an ordinary build, even a little chubby, and looked to be under 175 centimeters tall. At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about him.
The buzz-cut man looked at the photo, disgust in his eyes, and confirmed, “It was him.”
“You hated her boyfriend very much?”
Yes, he hated him.
Because Xue Mei’s boyfriend’s arrival shattered that private connection that existed only in his own mind. It shattered his unrealistic fantasy and forced him awake. Everything visible and invisible about Xue Mei belonged to another man.
And he was only a voyeur hiding in the dark, unable even to touch her. He didn’t like that feeling.
“Her boyfriend came often. He’d come every few days, and when he did, he’d usually stay the night,” the buzz-cut man recalled. “Sometimes it would already be very late at night and Xue Mei would already be asleep, but he’d still come to see her, then hold her while he slept.”
Listening to a voyeur confess the history of his peeping was not a pleasant experience at all.
Ji Mingrui, sitting to the side taking notes, felt that he had never done a record this painfully before.
But it had to be admitted: this neighbor who had spied on Xue Mei for so long was currently the person who “knew” her best. Xue Mei was dead and the killer’s whereabouts were still unknown. It was highly possible that some breakthrough could be found through this neighbor.
Wu Zhibin asked the most important question. “A month ago, when Xue Mei was killed, you saw nothing at all?”
The buzz-cut man said, “No. I went back to my hometown during that period. There was a funeral in the family.”
People generally wouldn’t lie about that kind of thing.
A quick check of the ticket records and a round of questioning would easily reveal whether it was true or false.
Wu Zhibin said, “After you came back, Xue Mei didn’t appear for a whole month. You never thought that was strange?”
The buzz-cut man said, “I did feel that it wasn’t normal, but earlier I had seen her arguing with her boyfriend, so I thought she had gone to find him. And I… I didn’t have any standing to ask about her whereabouts…”
He was a pervert hiding in the dark and peeping on her.
Even if he felt there was probably a problem with Xue Mei disappearing for a month, he had no way of bringing it up to anyone.
During the month Xue Mei was gone, the buzz-cut man would still occasionally go look through the little hole. Through it, he could see half of the freezer.
After the truth came out, every time he thought of that freezer, a chill ran down his back. During that past month, he had looked at that freezer countless times through the peeping hole while surveying Xue Mei’s room. He had never imagined that Xue Mei was inside it.
After they had taken the necessary notes and asked everything they needed to ask, Wu Zhibin and Ji Mingrui withdrew to the observation room to analyze the information.
But Ji Mingrui was holding the notebook in his arms, and the first thing he saw after pushing open the observation room door was Chi Qing’s hand clasped in Xie Lin’s. “…”
And that hand wasn’t wearing a glove.
Chi Qing still looked the same as usual—cold and indifferent, head slightly lowered as he sat there. It was hard to tell whether he had really been listening to the interrogation in the next room. But Ji Mingrui could now basically confirm one thing:
His brother probably had not been kidnapped.
