They were sitting in the break room because the moment they appeared in front of Zhou, his whole mental state would collapse instantly. His answers would become a mess, he’d start rambling, and in the end Zhou Zhiyi made a request: “Can you get them to leave?”
After he was brought into the interrogation room, he had already made two requests.
The first was: “Can you change the room?”
“Only Room 13 is empty,” the detective guarding him said. “There aren’t any other rooms. Pretty weird, huh? Instead of worrying about the room number, you should be thinking about how you’re going to be sentenced.”
Although they couldn’t question Zhou Zhiyi face-to-face, Xie Lin could still go to the observation room and listen in on the interrogation.
Chi Qing had only closed his eyes for less than two minutes when the phrase “I’m afraid you’ll get hurt” kept circling in his ears, as if possessed, turning over and over again. He decided it must be because the person beside him was too noisy. Sitting next to him even without speaking was affecting his sleep quality, so he opened his eyes again.
“You don’t need to go over there?”
“What for?” Xie Lin asked.
“To listen to them questioning him,” Chi Qing said. “Like, why he killed them.”
“That?” Xie Lin took a sip of tea and casually flipped through the file he had just pulled up on Zhou Zhiyi. “No need to listen. His method is pretty old-school. I can basically guess it.”
“…?”
“If you want to know, I can give you a simple explanation.”
Chi Qing had some intuition when it came to cases and details of the case, but not when it came to people. What Zhou Zhiyi was thinking, how he thought, what he had experienced—those were all blank spaces in Chi Qing’s mind. He didn’t care about them, and they weren’t important.
The complete opposite of him, Xie Lin seemed to be able to see through them easily.
Chi Qing didn’t say anything, so Xie Lin took it as agreement.
“The file shows that he grew up with divorced parents and lived with his father. He dated a few times, but none of the relationships lasted. So women had a strong attraction to him, but also a strong sense of uncertainty. He believed every woman around him would eventually leave him. They had never truly belonged to him. That’s why he chose to invade their private space every night. He enjoyed the sense of control that came from invading someone else’s territory. Rape-murder is also a source of that control. Aside from those lingering factors, his life probably hasn’t gone very smoothly.”
Xie Lin turned the page of Zhou Zhiyi’s file and said, “As expected, a graduate of a prestigious university who’s been mediocre for years after graduation would inevitably feel the gap. People who choose rape-murder usually try to find a feeling of ‘I can control this person’ in their victims in order to satisfy themselves.”
“But he knows he can’t keep doing this forever. Death is the only way he can ultimately have these people. Even though those women don’t know him, and may not even know he exists, the final moment belongs to him.”
“…”
Chi Qing couldn’t even understand normal people, let alone a pervert.
But Xie Lin seemed quite familiar with them.
“Wasn’t it pretty boring? Nothing new at all,” Xie Lin said, closing the file at last. “People who satisfy themselves by controlling the weak are themselves ‘the weak.’”
Chi Qing didn’t really believe that Xie Lin could figure out what Zhou Zhiyi was thinking just by looking at two pages of files.
“What you say—who knows if it’s true or not.”
At that moment, Ji Mingrui, who had heard the conversation from the break room door, spoke up.
“I’m going.”
Ji Mingrui had come over to report and also brought them some food. It was late at night, and they’d had to wait at the bureau for so long; they should at least be taken care of a bit.
“You installed a surveillance camera in our interrogation room or what?”
Chi Qing glanced at Ji Mingrui. “So he really guessed right?”
Ji Mingrui didn’t know whether “terrifying” was the right word to describe Consultant Xie. “About eighty or ninety percent. This isn’t even really guessing. This is more like an exact reenactment.”
Ji Mingrui, in the spirit of learning with humility, asked again, “Can you tell all that just by looking at the file?”
Was he just not reading files carefully enough?
Xie Lin accepted the bread Ji Mingrui handed him and thanked him. After a brief pause, he said, “You don’t even need the file. You can see it from the murder scene too. At the moment someone commits a crime, that’s often when their inner thoughts are most exposed.”
“…”
For Ji Mingrui, asking might not be of much use. He probably wouldn’t be able to learn it anyway.
He had already looked at the crime scene hundreds of times.
Zhou Zhiyi really had chosen to kill for exactly those reasons.
When he killed the first female tenant, it was right after he had just ended his last relationship.
“Look at you! Three years, and you’ve given me nothing,” the woman said coldly, dragging her suitcase. “I’m leaving.”
Her words mixed together with the one from years ago deep in his memory: “Xiaoyi, Mom’s leaving.”
Leaving.
…You’re all leaving.
In his heart Zhou Zhiyi raged: All of you fucking leave!
Day after day he kept working, continuing to be the most ordinary Anjia realtor imaginable, until one day a girl appeared. She smiled warmly. “Hello, I’m here to look for a place. We communicated on the app before. Your surname is Zhou, right? What a coincidence, I’m also surnamed Zhou.”
At that time, the branch where he worked wasn’t yet in Huainan City. That was the first person he killed.
After showing her the property, on some ghostly impulse, he walked into a key shop carrying the key. The shop owner looked up and asked, “Here to duplicate a key?”
He clenched the key in his pocket and silently walked out of the shop. Maybe from that moment on he had already started planning everything that would happen next: he couldn’t leave traces, it would be easy to trace it back to him, and he’d have to buy materials and make it himself.
The next day, before returning the key to the landlord, he hinted, “We’ll be signing normally tomorrow, right?”
The landlord said, “Why are you asking that?”
“Oh, nothing,” Zhou Zhiyi said with a faint smile. “There have been a lot of cases lately where landlords meet tenants through us, look at the place, and then sign privately with the tenants directly. But there’s nothing we can do about it. Our showings are free after all. If people want to sign privately, they aren’t violating any rules.”
The landlord hurriedly took the key. “…Why would I do something like that? Don’t worry, I’m not that kind of person.”
On the day of the signing, Zhou Zhiyi waited and waited, but as expected, the landlord never showed up. He sent a symbolic message asking about it, but got no reply. After work, he walked over to the wardrobe and hung up a key ring—one identical to the key he had returned to the landlord two days earlier.
In the break room, before Chi Qing ate, he always washed his hands. He stood up and said, “I’m going to the washroom.”
As he walked through the corridor, he realized he already knew the layout of every floor of the bureau very well. Over the past few months, he had surprisingly come to the bureau many times, always as if by accident.
Rows of departments lined both sides of the corridor. When Chi Qing reached the end and the water washed over his fingertips, he truly felt it: this case was over.
There would be no next Yang Zhenzhen.
The girl who had been targeted and lived in the same neighborhood as Ren Qin would go home tomorrow night, and no one would enter or leave her room. She could sleep safely.
Ji Mingrui had wanted to be a police officer since high school, and Chi Qing had never really understood that sense of heroism. He had only been interested in cases before, but at this moment, he somehow felt something indescribable—like the feeling of drawing back the curtains in the morning, when a new day is about to begin. Tomorrow Ren Qin would still be in that apartment downstairs instead of lying in the cold morgue.
The feeling wasn’t unpleasant.
Maybe it was because he’d been around too many people recently…
Chi Qing thought as he looked down at his hands.
Especially after meeting someone surnamed Xie, the number of times he had made unnecessary physical contact with others over the past few months had surpassed the total of the previous ten years. Even the meal he ate downstairs with Ren Qin was very much unlike his usual style.
Chi Qing dried his hands and headed back. At the corner of the corridor he heard someone say, “There’s nothing much to say about Zhou Zhiyi. The evidence is ironclad, and he confessed to everything.”
The voice sounded a little familiar—it was the detective who had just taken Zhou Zhiyi from them earlier.
“But more than the killer, Director Yuan is more worried about Consultant Xie, and also this consultant’s ‘assistant.’ No one knows how they caught him, but they scared the killer so badly.”
The familiar voice had just finished when another older voice said, “To be honest, even restoring Xie Lin’s consultant status hasn’t been agreed on by the bureau yet. If it weren’t for Director Yuan making the final call, they’d probably still be arguing.”
Chi Qing hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but there was only one way forward. He paused, wondering whether to keep walking, and then heard the older voice say, “If— I’m saying if… I don’t know who could control him. If he’s on our side, fine. But if he were on the other side, that would be unthinkable.”
At first people thought the psychological assessment from ten years ago might no longer be relevant, but after seeing Zhou Zhiyi, everyone fell into deep thought. Was it really okay to let him continue deeply involved in the case?
The two detectives didn’t say much more and left quickly.
They hadn’t revealed anything major, and it wasn’t really confidential. Chi Qing already knew that there had always been a “former” in front of Xie Lin’s consultant title, but he had never known why.
The people at the bureau… seemed more fearful of Xie Lin than admiring of his investigative ability.
That was very strange.
As he walked, Chi Qing put on his gloves. He wasn’t sure whether his inability to read Xie Lin had anything to do with this.
Even someone like Chi Qing, whose perception of people was very low, had sensed that Xie Lin was abnormal. Not the kind of abnormality that came from the first time they met, when he acted like a crazy person and was overly enthusiastic and talked nonsense. Rather, it was the fact that he seemed to be smiling in every situation, even when lying under the bed to greet Zhou Zhiyi.
Back in the break room, although the case had come to an end, there were still many things about Chi Qing that were impossible to explain.
For example, why someone who didn’t care about other people at all would suddenly go say those things to Ren Qin, as if… as if he had already decided she was the next victim.
That simply didn’t make sense based on all the publicly known case information.
Xie Lin asked Ji Mingrui, “Have you known him for many years?”
Ji Mingrui said, “Way too many. We were classmates in high school.”
Xie Lin said, “Oh,” and asked again, “Was he always like this back in high school?”
Ji Mingrui thought about it. “Even worse than now.”
“Then he definitely doesn’t have many friends.”
“Besides me, he really doesn’t.”
“He’s very smart.”
“Top of the whole school on the gaokao.”
Ji Mingrui answered up to that point, then realized something was off.
…Why is this person so interested in my brother?!
