Chi Qing pulled on a jacket, and before leaving, carefully drew a pair of black gloves from the row hanging by the entryway and put them on. Then he supported Xie Lin the whole way from the elevator to the entrance of the residential complex. While waiting for the car, he noticed the two of them were standing far too close together, Xie Lin’s warmth seeming to pass straight through the fabric and into him. Chi Qing turned his head and tried to create some distance, saying, “Move away.”
“I’ll fall without something to lean on,” Xie Lin said. “That’s a request I really can’t fulfill.”
Traffic flowed ceaselessly along the road. The temperature had warmed, and the midday sun beat down until the skin felt feverish.
Xie Lin glanced at Chi Qing and thought he looked like a vampire forced to walk in sunlight — his skin an eerily pale white where the light traced over him, his lips startlingly red.
Xie Lin recalled that time after dinner at Ren Qin’s place, when he had, as if possessed, reached out to touch Chi Qing’s lips and asked whether he was wearing lipstick.
The feeling of that moment was still vivid in memory now… very soft.
And yet the words that came out of those lips were always the complete opposite of their softness. Chi Qing, keeping half his attention on the pedestrians ahead to avoid anyone walking without looking where they were going, said at last, his patience exhausted: “Just buy a wheelchair.”
“Buy a what?”
“A wheelchair,” Chi Qing said. “Next time you want to take a stroll, you can wheel yourself from this street all the way to the next block on your own.”
“…”
Mid-conversation, their ordered car pulled up to the curb.
“Last four digits 6xx9 — going to the police station?” The driver glanced at the destination on the order and asked.
“Sorry, could we change the address,” Xie Lin said after climbing in. “Somewhere else first.”
“Yin Wanru?” An hour later, in the interrogation room, Wu Zhibin sat across from a woman at an angle and asked. “Couldn’t reach you all day yesterday. Keeping busy?”
Even seated in the cramped little room, the woman still wore a large pair of sunglasses. As a public figure, she maintained an iron grip on her appearance — in the dead of winter, beneath a mink coat she wore only a wine-red camisole dress. Her hair fell in generous waves, and sitting there she looked as though she were posing for a magazine cover. Her slender legs were crossed, her feet in heels encrusted with silver sequins.
“Busy, of course — with so many schedules,” she said, one hand tipped with red nail polish rising to hook a finger over the rim of her sunglasses and draw them from her face, revealing those strikingly beautiful features. “We’ve been filming in the mountains lately. No signal out there. Couldn’t get any calls.”
Her account was airtight.
She had spent years navigating the entertainment industry and was sharp enough to notice that two seats beside Wu Zhibin were empty, one of which was the head seat. Today’s interrogation would not be conducted by him alone.
She had barely glanced at those two empty seats when the glass door of the interrogation room was pushed open. A voice with a trailing, drawn-out lilt spoke up — carrying a faint undercurrent of amusement, picking up seamlessly where she had left off: “Filming in the mountains does sound rough. Just off a flight, I take it?”
Then a face appeared before her — one that would have held its own even in the entertainment world. The man had slightly upturned brows, the collar of his shirt left carelessly undone, and through the gap it was just possible to make out the edge of a red mark. In looks and in manner alike, he was worlds apart from every officer she had passed on the way in — save for the fact that he was leaning on something, seemingly injured.
Xie Lin looked as though he had wandered in by mistake.
“I came as soon as I heard this morning,” the woman said, glancing away.
“There were three flights departing from Huanan today. Of those, only two pass over mountain ranges. Daming Mountain issued a strict ban on all activity following a landslide, which leaves only one possibility: you came back from Qin Mountain in the north,” Xie Lin said with a smile. “Qin Mountain is famously short on water. And yet here you are, Miss Yin, looking radiant after your time roughing it in the hills.”
Yin Wanru’s expression froze.
Having a cover story punctured so neatly was difficult to shrug off — but she had weathered worse. Staying in this industry meant you had seen everything. She settled her hand on her crossed legs and smiled back, obligingly: “That’s true. My manager arranged for a great deal of bottled water to be brought in. The conditions were rough, but wherever I am, I try to present my best self.”
Her meaning was clear enough.
Say what you like. I had mineral water to bathe in. There’s no rule against that.
As she spoke, she noticed that Xie Lin had someone beside him — neither of them in uniform.
…The other one looked even more like someone from the industry. Though she had no memory of him.
She was a woman, and the first word that surfaced when she looked at him was “beautiful” — but it was a beauty that made you afraid to look twice. Something dark coiled beneath it, like black fog. When those eyes turned her way, she felt a jolt of unease.
Xie Lin gestured toward Yin Wanru. “You two are practically colleagues, in a sense. Have you met?”
Chi Qing: “Don’t know her.”
He had barely acknowledged Xie Lin the entire way over. The man was exhausting.
Once inside the interrogation room, before setting down his cane, Xie Lin finally found his moment. He used the cane to point at the chair beside Wu Zhibin. “I can’t sit down easily. Help me.”
“…”
Chi Qing’s silence lasted less than two seconds before Xie Lin started again: “This leg of mine, I wonder whose fault it is that I even…”
Chi Qing pulled out the chair and, with no desire to make a scene in front of others, silently pressed him down into it.
Even here he refused to behave.
“Hand me something to write with,” Xie Lin said once seated.
Chi Qing noted: “Your leg is injured. Not your hand.”
Xie Lin tilted his wrist and said, quietly: “It started as just the leg. But last night, being left without a care in the bathroom by a certain heartless individual… I twisted my wrist trying to get up. I’m afraid the scope of what you owe me may need to expand.”
Chi Qing returned in an equally low voice: “Your brain seems pretty badly injured too.”
Wu Zhibin, listening to the increasingly alarming direction of this exchange, cleared his throat with considerable force.
The two uninvited consultants fell quiet.
“I’m bringing you in today to assist with an investigation. Since you’re such a busy person, I won’t waste time — I’ll get straight to the point.”
Wu Zhibin placed a photograph face-up on the table. “What were you doing at the hospital at two in the morning last week?”
Yin Wanru barely glanced at the photograph. “Let me think — it’s hard to keep track with so many commitments. Something that small, I really have to think back.” After a pause, she let out a sudden “ah” and pressed a hand to her forehead. “Right, I remember now — how could I forget. I went to see someone. My manager was ill.”
They had investigated in advance. Yin Wanru had no patient record at this private hospital.
And indeed, as she claimed, her manager had been admitted that night — listed as an acute appendicitis case.
But Zhang Feng would hardly have pressed his shutter for something so unremarkable. And he certainly hadn’t lost his life over it.
Whatever had brought Yin Wanru to that hospital in the early hours was not as simple as she was making it sound.
“You’re that close with your manager? Close enough to disguise yourself and make a trip at midnight just because she was sick?”
“You have to understand — people like us, in this industry, we have no private lives. No real friends either. People here are your friend today and at your throat tomorrow. The only one who stays by your side long-term is your manager. So it’s less of a professional relationship and more like… comrades in arms. We’ve always been close,” Yin Wanru said.
Years of interviews had honed her well. She could make the false sound true and the true sound false without so much as a flicker. No trace of anxiety or faltering showed on her. Not even when the photograph in front of her might very well conceal a secret that touched her directly.
Then she said: “Is that photograph really all you have? Actually, while we’re at it — could someone explain why we as public figures can never seem to get any protection for our likeness rights?”
Her voice lifted slightly as she spoke, as though she genuinely intended to seek justice on behalf of the profession.
But the conversation did not follow where she tried to lead it.
Xie Lin looked at her and said: “Your lies are impressively constructed, Miss Yin. The emotional performance is quite convincing. But your manager wasn’t actually admitted for appendicitis that night, was she.”
He brought up his phone. Audio played from the speaker — a man’s voice, a recording:
“She came to the hospital for a procedure, but we have protocols. I couldn’t fabricate a surgery from nothing, so I filed it under the manager’s name and performed it on her instead.”
“You were the attending surgeon?”
“Yes, I was on duty that night. I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking straight. She offered me five hundred thousand. I’m getting married soon, and the down payment was out of reach. Property prices are going up again, and my partner had been giving me grief about putting it off — I was at my wit’s end–“
Yin Wanru’s composure cracked visibly. Color drained from her face as she listened.
She had come in with complete confidence. The doctor had taken her money. They had arranged everything, left no evidence, made it airtight — and the doctor would never confess, because confessing would mean destroying himself. He would lose his license. No hospital would ever take him again.
What she had not anticipated was that, an hour earlier, Xie Lin had redirected their car and paid a visit to the hospital.
“How did you…” Yin Wanru’s mouth fell open.
The recording continued.
“What procedure did you perform?”
The man hesitated.
“It was… a termination.”
The recording ended there.
With that, everything fell into place. A manager and her artist are bound together. News of a top actress’s pregnancy and abortion would be damaging for everyone. A manager who had spent years building a star wasn’t about to let her implode at a moment like this.
Xie Lin answered the question she had asked earlier: “What money can accomplish, money can also undo. Wherever the scales of self-interest tip, that’s where loyalty lies.”
“Nothing stays hidden forever,” he continued. “Whatever a person does, they leave traces.”
The bravado Yin Wanru had walked in with was gone. The brightness in those striking eyes dimmed by degrees. She gripped her sunglasses and said nothing for a long time.
“Yes. I was pregnant.”
Yin Wanru raised a hand and pushed her fingers through the cascade of her hair. “My career is at its peak right now. Having a child was out of the question. A pregnancy alone would cost me half a year, and after coming back, the leading roles would never come as easily again. This career has a shelf life to begin with. Having a child would be sawing off the branch I’m sitting on.”
“Getting to where I am wasn’t easy. I’ve suffered for it, been cheated, been burned. When I first graduated I lived in a basement for over a year, doing bit parts, working as an extra. This child was an accident. I wasn’t going to let it destroy my life.”
So, in the early hours of that morning last week, she had changed her clothes, waited for the streets to quiet, and driven alone to the hospital. She could not be seen by anyone. She could not leave any medical record. She paid off a doctor, and went under the name of her manager.
“Who was the father?”
“A trainee at our company.” Yin Wanru answered.
“Were you in a relationship?”
“Nothing like that,” Yin Wanru gave a small smile. “Just passing the time.”
“His name.”
“Luo Yu.”
“You knew Zhang Feng had photographed you.”
“Yes. He contacted me. His price was fifty million. I didn’t have that kind of money.”
“So you decided to have him killed.”
Up until that exchange, Yin Wanru’s answers had been relatively cooperative — with everything now exposed, there was little left to hide. But at the words “have him killed,” something shifted. She sat up straight and said: “I wanted the material back. But have him killed? How could you think I would do that?”
Coming out of the interrogation room, Wu Zhibin turned to look at the two of them.
“What do you think?”
Xie Lin spoke with a hand resting on Chi Qing’s shoulder, steadying himself: “Yin Wanru has had years of performance training — it’s not easy to tell truth from performance in real time. There’s no hard evidence pointing to her yet, but we can’t rule her out either. She has a strong motive.”
Wu Zhibin: “More or less what I thought. And you?”
Wu Zhibin turned to the consultant surnamed Chi, who had been quietly and methodically attempting to remove the arm Xie Lin had draped over his shoulder.
Chi Qing said: “I don’t think it was her.”
“You don’t think it was her?”
He had heard what the masked man said before dying. At first the words had seemed entirely unremarkable — had even made him regret the effort of cutting his glove for a moment.
But just now, sitting beside Yin Wanru, watching the woman’s immaculate makeup and styled hair across the table, a thought had struck him: Yin Wanru’s name was everywhere — billboards, every corner of the city. She was that famous. So why would the masked man have said he’d forgotten the name of whoever hired him?
— The person who came to me was a celebrity.
— Forgot the name. Damn it…
After a moment, Chi Qing said only: “Intuition.”
Then he looked at Xie Lin. “…Could you lean against the wall.”
