Chi Qing actually couldn’t make out what the person in front of him looked like. It was too dark. He could only see the other man’s eyes and the vague outline of his face.
The reason he was able to call out the man’s name accurately was that, just then, he suddenly remembered a detail—a very small detail, one he had not paid attention to at the time.
“You might be wondering who I am. We’ve met before. No, to be precise, you saw me on your own.”
“A month ago, I was looking for a place on Anjia’s app. I was looking at the seventh-floor unit in Building 135 at Tianrui. That day you had something come up at the last minute and had your colleague show the place instead. You should remember now.”
Chi Qing sat up and, taking advantage of the moment when the other man was startled and stunned, neatly took the knife from his hand. Holding the silver-glinting restricted blade, it suddenly looked as if their roles had been reversed. If the police had kicked the door open at that exact moment, they would have had to wonder which one of them was the one about to commit a crime.
Chi Qing continued calmly, “You actually came that day, but just as you were about to walk over, you saw the person standing next to me.”
Inside the wardrobe, Ji Mingrui was thinking, “Damn, my brother is really something—he even dares to snatch a knife,” while also wondering, “Who was standing next to him?”
As he thought about it, he realized the scene Chi Qing described seemed familiar…
“Fuck, wasn’t that me?!”
The person standing beside Chi Qing that day was Ji Mingrui.
If you rewind to that day: Ji Mingrui had been investigating the Yangyuan case. When he looked up, he saw Chi Qing waiting for the realtor across the street.
Ji Mingrui’s police uniform was so conspicuous that it stood out even from a great distance, and the badge on his chest flashed in the sunlight. Zhou Zhiyi rushed over from the nearby Anjia office and, from halfway across the street, saw that police uniform.
“Hello? It’s like this. I have a client I’m supposed to take to a showing, but something suddenly came up. Could you…”
Pedestrians hurried along the street. He only stopped and looked from afar for a couple of seconds. After making the call, he turned and disappeared into the crowd.
“That day, you must have seen us from a distance on that street too, and because you wanted to avoid too much contact with the police,” Chi Qing inferred his thought process, “you didn’t show up.”
At the same time, the police operation on their side had also made progress.
The realtor with the surname Zhang, who had been missing all day, finally turned his phone on. According to him, he had gone back to his rural hometown. The place was remote and had had no signal the whole time. After ruling out the realtor surnamed Zhang, the only one who still fit the profile but could not be contacted was one person.
“The phone still won’t go through,” Jiang Yu said. “I just went to his place to ask around. I found this guy is really strange. He doesn’t get along with the neighbors. Their neighborhood is an old compound with terrible soundproofing, and the neighbors are elderly people with poor sleep. One old man said he often heard him going out in the middle of the night.”
Su Xiaolan felt they couldn’t wait any longer. “This Zhou guy isn’t right. Let’s just go to his place ourselves.”
Zhou Zhiyi’s home was on the sixth floor. He shared the apartment with a stranger: a company office worker who left early and came back late. They weren’t close enough for anything like this, and the office worker didn’t know what had happened, so when he opened the door, he let them in. “He’s not home right now.”
Su Xiaolan asked, “Does he go out at this hour a lot?”
The office worker thought for a moment. “Seems like it, but I’m not sure. I usually go to bed pretty early.”
Su Xiaolan walked up to Zhou Zhiyi’s bedroom door.
The office worker said, “No key. He always locks the door when he goes out. If you have something to ask him, maybe come back tomorrow—”
Bang!
Su Xiaolan kicked the door open with one straight, forceful strike of her leg.
…You can say the rest later.
The office worker silently swallowed the last two words.
There weren’t many things in Zhou Zhiyi’s room. He seemed obsessive about order and liked to keep things neat. The desk was clean, with a few books on it, and the bed was perfectly made. At first glance, the room looked ordinary.
It was just an ordinary man’s room.
Su Xiaolan’s gaze swept over the room and then moved toward the wardrobe. She found that the wardrobe was also locked. A brass lock hung on the handles, fastening the two doors together.
But who would lock a wardrobe for no reason?
Was he hiding gold in there or what?
Before she “used her power” this time, Su Xiaolan gave a warning first. “You all move aside.”
She grabbed a sturdy object nearby and smashed the lock with it. After a few hits, the lock broke open.
The office worker thought to himself that this policewoman was really fierce…
But when the wardrobe door was pulled open, no one expected to see a wall of keys. Half the wardrobe panel had rows of nails hammered into it, each nail driven in only halfway so the exposed half could be used for hanging things—dazzling rings of keys hung all over it.
All of these keys were very new. They were clearly freshly duplicated.
Each ring of keys represented someone’s home, someone’s most private place.
Staring at that wall of keys, Su Xiaolan felt a chill at the back of her neck and thought: were the keys to Yang Zhenzhen’s and Xue Mei’s homes also in here?
Meanwhile, in Ren Qin’s bedroom, things became more complicated. Seeing that things had been exposed, Zhou Zhiyi no longer cared about his shock. He lunged forward to snatch the knife back. After Chi Qing dodged him, he flipped the knife in one hand so that the blade pointed backward, keeping the point away from people.
Zhou Zhiyi lunged and missed. He grabbed the bedsheet tightly with both hands and yanked it up, trying to create resistance with it, but Chi Qing got off the bed before him.
Zhou Zhiyi stared at him with killing intent.
He didn’t know why this person had appeared here.
Or how he had seen through him.
At this point, killing one person or killing two made no difference to him. He didn’t mind dealing with one more.
Thinking this, Zhou Zhiyi saw Chi Qing already near the bedroom door. He jumped off the bed with lightning speed. But just as his foot touched the floor, a hand shot out from under the bed like a ghost, and he felt something grip his ankle!
Xie Lin had waited under the bed for so long for this exact moment. With the limited space under the bed, he braced his wrist against the floor, curled his fingers, restricted the other man’s movement, and dragged him back.
What the hell was under the bed?!
Zhou Zhiyi was shocked.
Because he had jumped off the bed so quickly, he was now also falling forward at high speed. When he hit the floor, his face was pressed so close to the underside of the bed that he finally saw a person lying there without making a sound!
He couldn’t see what this person looked like, but he saw the hand that hadn’t withdrawn. On it was a silver ring. When the man spoke, there was a friendly hint of a smile in his voice, as if he were greeting someone. “Sorry. Hope I didn’t scare you. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time too.”
Zhou Zhiyi: “…”
He had never imagined there would be someone hidden under the bed too.
He pushed his hands against the floor, trying to get up as quickly as possible, but the person under the bed wasn’t going to let him.
Xie Lin kept hold of his ankle and dragged him toward the bed. Zhou Zhiyi could only kick wildly. After breaking free, he scrambled up on all fours, and as he got up he tried to grab something to steady himself. His hand reached forward, and he actually touched something.
It was a wardrobe door.
The wardrobe and the big bed in the room were less than two steps apart. He grabbed the wardrobe door, and in the motion, accidentally pulled it open—only to suddenly come face to face with two curled-up black silhouettes inside.
Ji Mingrui had Ren Qin’s coat hanging over his head in the wardrobe. Because the wardrobe was a closed space and the clothes blocked most of the view, his and Ren Qin’s shadows looked even darker, like ghosts hiding in the wardrobe in the middle of the night.
Zhou Zhiyi’s pupils widened uncontrollably.
Thinking that the two people had already greeted him, Ji Mingrui figured he should probably say something too, so he spoke up: “Didn’t expect that, huh? We’ve been staring at you from the wardrobe for quite a while.”
Zhou Zhiyi: “…………”
At 1:30 a.m., the central bureau.
That time of night should have been after work, and even the people in the bureau who often stayed late were preparing to rest their heads on their desks for a short nap when an urgent call suddenly snapped the whole bureau awake.
“What happened?” one detective asked.
“The officer said the suspect has been caught,” the detective answering the call said. “He’s being brought to the bureau now. The suspect’s surname is Zhou. He’s an Anjia realtor. During tonight’s search, our officers also found suspicious evidence. There’s an entire wall of keys hanging in his wardrobe.”
The bureau immediately went back into busy mode, and everyone became fully alert.
Director Yuan, who had already gone home, hurried back too. He was putting on his coat while pushing open the bureau’s front door and walking in. By the time he reached the interrogation room, he had just finished straightening his collar.
After a long moment, he stood silently outside the interrogation room and looked inside, asking, “Can anyone tell me what happened?”
“The suspect has been caught, but why is he in this mental state?”
“…”
“Did he go crazy?”
Zhou Zhiyi had been badly frightened at Ren Qin’s house by the person on the bed, the hand that suddenly伸ed out from under the bed, and the people in the wardrobe. By now, sitting in the interrogation room, he could only keep his head down and drink water, asking the detective for one cup after another.
The detective couldn’t help asking him, “Why are you drinking so much water?”
Zhou Zhiyi said nothing for a long time before finally replying, “I’m a little scared.”
The detective was baffled: You’re the suspect. You were there to break into someone’s home and kill them. What the hell are you scared of?!
Ji Mingrui, as one of the people involved, was standing beside Director Yuan.
Faced with the question, Ji Mingrui: “…”
That was hard to explain at the moment.
Director Yuan asked again, “I’m asking you. What’s wrong with him? Answer me.”
Ji Mingrui scratched his head. “Well, during the arrest, we used some… rather special methods. He might have been scared.”
The other two people involved in the arrest were now sitting in the break room.
Chi Qing noticed Xie Lin kept staring at him.
It was already this late. He was tired and sleepy, and didn’t have the energy to deal with him, so he curled up on the sofa in the break room and planned to close his eyes and sleep for a while. But even with his eyes closed, that gaze was still impossible to ignore.
Chi Qing opened his eyes. “What are you looking at?”
Xie Lin didn’t hide it at all. His eyes were still on Chi Qing, moving from his collar to the small section of wrist exposed outside his clothes. After looking over everything, he said, “Checking whether you were injured anywhere.”
“You snatched the knife just now,” Xie Lin said. “That was actually decent of you this time. You even knew to hold the blade backward and avoid accidentally injuring him.”
Chi Qing knew he was referring to the time in the rain when he had pointed the tip of the umbrella at him.
Before closing his eyes again, Chi Qing made it clear that Xie Lin was overthinking it: “I wasn’t trying to avoid injuring him.”
“The knife and the umbrella are different. I was afraid that if a fight broke out, I’d accidentally injure myself. As for whether Zhou Zhiyi got hurt, that wasn’t part of my consideration,” Chi Qing analyzed it rationally. “The knife was his. I wasn’t deliberately hurting anyone. If I accidentally cut him, that would count as self-defense.”
“…”
