Zeng Peng’s silence was broken, but as the saying goes, the last ten percent of a hundred-mile journey is the hardest half. His contact, their pickup location—these were still a tangled mess of loose ends. However, these matters were no longer Huo Ranyin and Ji Xun’s responsibility to handle.
Huo Ranyin had fulfilled his promise to provide clues to the public security captain, Teng Tianhai. He made a call, briefly explained the situation, and waited for a while until the other party’s people arrived to take custody of Zeng Peng. Only then did he get back into the car with Ji Xun.
After all this commotion, it was nearly twelve o’clock.
Ji Xun’s eyes were vacant as he stared at the gray ceiling of the car, looking utterly exhausted, as if his soul had left his body.
“I’ll take you home now,” Huo Ranyin said. “Really tired?”
“What do you think?”
“Sweat more in peacetime,” Huo Ranyin said cryptically.
“So you’ll bleed less in wartime?” Ji Xun scoffed. “I’m not at war right now, so I can’t bleed.”
“You’re only 29. You can’t be incapable,” Huo Ranyin changed his phrasing.
“Capable or not, you sound so sure. Have you experienced it?” Ji Xun made a suggestive comment.
Unfortunately, even after his crude remark, Huo Ranyin didn’t so much as glance his way. The man kept both hands on the steering wheel, his gaze fixed on the road ahead, not running red lights or speeding, just proceeding steadily in his own lane like a law-abiding citizen.
Wanting to bicker but getting no response felt like punching a marshmallow, leaving one feeling a bit lonely.
Ji Xun said regretfully, “Captain Huo must be 62 this year, right?”
Huo Ranyin: “Why do you say that?”
Ji Xun: “Without a certain age, you can’t drive this steadily, like an old ox pulling a plow.”
Just as he finished speaking, Huo Ranyin’s phone rang.
Huo Ranyin immediately flicked on his turn signal, pulled over to the side of the road, and answered his phone. “Hello?”
Huo Ranyin listened quietly for a moment, then hung up and said to Ji Xun, “I just had someone check Cheng Zheng’s travel times.”
“Impressive, Captain Huo. Racing against the clock to solve the case, leaving no stone unturned in the search for truth,” Ji Xun praised.
“The results just came back. Cheng Zheng’s story mostly checks out,” Huo Ranyin continued. “On the 19th at 20:43, Cheng Zheng and his fellow villagers, including Xi Lei’s parents and brother, went to the Old Hometown Restaurant on Xingchun Road for dinner.”
“How far is Xinglin Road from Xingchun Road?” Ji Xun suddenly asked. On the same day, the 19th, at 19:00, Tang Jinglong appeared at the Museum Garden on Xinglin Road, while Cheng Zheng was at the Old Hometown Restaurant on Xingchun Road. Based on street naming conventions, the two roads shouldn’t be too far apart.
“It’s right next to it,” Huo Ranyin said. “Cross one street from the Museum Garden and walk another three hundred meters, and you’re at the Old Hometown Restaurant.”
“Wow, so close, so suspicious,” Ji Xun clicked his tongue. “But I bet it’s useless.”
“Intuition again?”
“Do you even need intuition for this?” Ji Xun scoffed. “Cheng Zheng just described his itinerary in such detail, basically laying it all out for you to check. This attitude could be seen as brazenly confident or completely transparent. Either way, since he spelled it all out, how could he let you find any problems?”
“Do you think he’s the killer?” Huo Ranyin asked.
“I don’t have a feeling either way.” Ji Xun reached into his pocket, pulled out a one-yuan coin, and began flipping it on his fingertips. “Why don’t we leave it to the coin? Heads he is, tails he isn’t?”
“…” Huo Ranyin barely resisted the urge to throw Ji Xun out of the car.
His face was flat as he continued, “Based on the current evidence, he really isn’t. After 21:48 that day, they paid the bill and left the restaurant, then drove back to their small village. It’s a four-hour drive. At 01:34 on the 20th, they exited the highway, which is not the same one that goes to Wushan. There was no time to commit the crime in the city. After that day, there are no records of those vehicles entering the city from the highway toll booths. Of course, those license plates also don’t appear among the vehicles that entered or exited Wushan after the 19th.”
Just as he finished speaking, Huo Ranyin’s phone rang again.
This time it was Tan Mingjiu. The guy tended to get loud when he was excited.
Ji Xun looked out the car window and realized they were near his home. Ahead was Ning City’s Third Hospital, which was only two blocks away from his place.
The Third Hospital. It had just been mentioned by the coffee shop employee that morning.
Tang Jinglong had asked his companion to help arrange a hospital bed for the employee’s sick mother, a bed at the Third Hospital.
A sense of foreboding sprouted in his heart, and he decided to get home on his own.
He unbuckled his seatbelt, placed one hand on the driver’s seat, and with the other, tapped his knuckles on Huo Ranyin’s long arm, which was resting on the steering wheel.
Huo Ranyin glanced at him and lifted his arm.
Ji Xun leaned over to reach the door lock, but he misjudged the space. His back bumped into Huo Ranyin’s raised arm, and the man’s elbow came down, his fingers brushing against his neck.
The cool fingers felt like a drop of water falling from the sky, and Ji Xun shivered.
Only after the shiver did he realize the fingers didn’t linger on his neck for long. They lifted slightly, brushed across his forehead to move the hair out of his eyes, and then reached forward to unlock the car door for him.
He was actually being considerate for once.
Just then, Huo Ranyin suddenly said, “The people at Liangjingjing KTV all stated that whenever Tang Jinglong appeared, there was always someone with him. This person is Xu Xinran, a urologist at the Third Hospital, a heavy gambler. He was also the one who argued with Tang Jinglong at the conference on the night of the 19th. But you guys were a step too late and didn’t catch him. Now he’s driven away from the hospital?”
The Third Hospital was 200 meters ahead.
Xu Xinran had fled in a car.
This was most likely the person who had coffee with Tang Jinglong and solved the coffee shop employee’s mother’s hospital bed problem!
Caught off guard, Ji Xun heard everything and quickly grasped the key points. His sense of foreboding was confirmed. He abruptly sat up straight and spoke rapidly, “My place is just a stone’s throw from here. You go handle your business, I’ll walk home myself.”
Too late.
Huo Ranyin’s long arm shot out, pushing Ji Xun back into his seat. With incredible speed, while fastening Ji Xun’s seatbelt, his other hand had already hit the door lock. At the same time, he slammed on the accelerator. The engine roared, and the car shot forward like an arrow from a bow!
The forward inertia pressed Ji Xun firmly into his seat. He watched as his small goal of getting home, once just a step away, grew more and more distant until it vanished. A single word escaped from his throat: “…Fuck.”
He had cursed too soon.
Huo Ranyin was still on the phone with Tan Mingjiu. Huo Ranyin repeated, “The other party’s car is a blue Jetta, license plate NS8873SN. Yes, I see him.”
Not only did Huo Ranyin see it, but Ji Xun also saw it.
A blue Jetta with that license plate was heading toward them from the opposite direction, the two cars in lanes going in opposite directions. Both were moving fast. In just a couple of breaths, the two cars met, separated only by the yellow line on the road.
Just then, Huo Ranyin executed a maneuver worthy of a god of racing, a soul-drifting turn. After a dizzying spin, Ji Xun found that the car he was in had changed lanes and direction, directly blocking the blue Jetta’s path.
The two beams of light from the Jetta’s headlights were like two knives piercing through the glass of Ji Xun’s car. Through the blinding glare, Ji Xun could clearly see Xu Xinran’s distorted and panicked expression. He could even seem to hear his terrified shout:
“No—”
In that critical moment, a panicked Xu Xinran, with no other way out, wrenched the steering wheel. The front of the car turned sharply, scraping past Huo Ranyin’s car and crashing hard into the roadside guardrail. From the direction he had come, police sirens blared. One by one, police cars pierced the darkness, catching up and surrounding the blue Jetta, bringing Xu Xinran under control.
Huo Ranyin parked the car and turned his head casually to look at Ji Xun. “How about that? Not like an old ox pulling a plow now, am I?”
Ji Xun’s mouth was dry, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Huo Ranyin, what did I ever do to you? Why do you hate me so much?”
Huo Ranyin smiled slightly. “When did I ever hate you?”
Ji Xun: “If he hadn’t slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel just now, my passenger seat would have been smashed through. If that’s not enough hate, what is?”
“I knew what I was doing. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”
“I couldn’t tell at all.”
“Even if something happened to me, I wouldn’t let it happen to you,” Huo Ranyin said again. “If you’re worried, next time I’ll use my driver’s seat to block.”
Huo Ranyin sounded quite sincere.
Unfortunately, Ji Xun didn’t feel the slightest bit moved. His mouth twitched. “There’s a next time?”
Seeing the man beside him looked ready to flee at any moment, Huo Ranyin wisely changed the subject. “It’s really over now. Let me take you home. It’s such a short distance, it’s not worth taking a taxi, and walking is tiring.”
“Home my ass!”
“?”
“Take me to the Raccoon Bar,” Ji Xun said with a blank expression. “I can’t sleep anymore. Time to party.”
Ji Xun wasn’t joking. Huo Ranyin turned the car around and took Ji Xun to the Raccoon Bar.
For people with healthy sleep schedules, twelve o’clock at night was dream time. But in the bar, people were coming and going, the atmosphere was heating up. He walked through the employee passage to the stage where the drum kit was set up. The moment he put on his in-ear monitors and felt the drumsticks in his hand, he unleashed all the frustration in his heart with a powerful beat!
“Crash—”
The dance floor was a blur of dazzling lights and bobbing heads. People were drunk and boisterous, laughing, shouting, overflowing with passion and joy. Behind them was the drummer, the drumbeats like rain, like thunder, like a feast for the eardrums presented by Ji Xun.
Huo Ranyin listened in the bar for a while, then turned to the bartender. “Can I send flowers?”
By the time Ji Xun finished drumming and came down from the stage, a large table had been set up in the center of the bar, with a champagne tower stacked on it. Pink rosé champagne slowly poured down from the top, filling the crystal-clear glasses.
The bar’s patrons gathered around the large table, waiting for the owner of the champagne tower—Ji Xun—to pick up the topmost glass and kick off the champagne party.
Jenny stood beside him, clicking her tongue in amazement. “Big shot, someone just sent you a champagne tower. I haven’t seen you in ten days, and you’ve become even more charming. They quietly presented you with this gift and didn’t even dare to stay and ask for your phone number.”
“Anything besides the champagne tower?”
“And a bouquet of flowers.” Like a magician, Jenny pulled a bouquet of fresh flowers from behind her back. “There’s a card from him inside. I didn’t peek—did he leave his contact information for you?”
Ji Xun took the flowers, removed the card, and on it were three short lines handwritten by Huo Ranyin, the calligraphy like the man himself, sharp and powerful, with a hint of brilliance:
The police and the people are like fish in water.
Showing support.
You’re welcome.
Ji Xun flicked the card with his finger, let out a short laugh, then turned, picked up a glass from the champagne tower, raised it gracefully, and said to the crowd:
“Someone’s treating. Don’t be shy. Cheers!”
“Cheers!”
After dropping off Ji Xun, Huo Ranyin didn’t rest. He drove back to the police station to see the suspect.
When he arrived, the interrogation had just begun. Colleagues from the pre-trial team were inside handling Xu Xinran. It was obvious that progress was not smooth. Apart from saying “I want to see my lawyer” at the very beginning, Xu Xinran remained as silent as a mute, no matter what the pre-trial team said.
Time ticked by. The excitement from the dopamine rush after catching the suspect was fading, and the magic of the night reasserted itself. The body’s biological clock resolutely rejected the stimulation of the lights, and people began to feel drowsy.
Cups of strong tea were placed on the table, and people started smoking.
Huo Ranyin sat in a corner, flipping through Xu Xinran’s file.
Xu Xinran, male, 42 years old, Master’s degree, attending physician in the urology department of the Third Hospital, married and divorced, with an 8-year-old son who lives with his ex-wife.
The 1.23 Wushan dismemberment case was extremely brutal and had a severe social impact. The city bureau had already formed a special task force with key personnel. The ones interrogating him now were the elite of the pre-trial team, but it was clear that the suspect they had caught tonight was also one of the toughest nuts to crack.
The two sides were at a stalemate.
Things were different now. If a suspect was determined not to talk, the police couldn’t force them. They could only use various methods to break down their psychological defenses or use a solid and complete chain of evidence to convince the court and secure a guilty verdict without the suspect saying a word.
But right now, the chain of evidence was far from sufficient to convict the suspect. They could only rely on the pre-trial experts to continue their efforts.
With no progress in sight, the members of the special task force had to work tomorrow and follow up on other leads. They couldn’t all just wait here. The group quickly came to a decision: apart from the pre-trial team, those who needed rest should go rest, and those who wanted to wait could wait a bit longer.
Huo Ranyin chose to stay, but he didn’t just wait idly. The number of business cards found in Tang Jinglong’s safe was considerable, and investigating them was very time-consuming. He took the files and went through them page by page. When a colleague called him to go rest, he gave a perfunctory reply and continued as before.
Until someone patted his shoulder.
Huo Ranyin’s shoulder dipped, evading the hand. He looked up and saw who it was, refraining from any further action.
“Captain Yuan.”
“Go get some sleep. It’s almost five,” Yuan Yue said. “The pre-trial guys inside are already snoring.”
In reality, the pre-trial officers were still waiting to break the suspect. Without more evidence, the interrogation of Xu Xinran could last a maximum of 24 hours. With such limited time, they wouldn’t dare to actually sleep. Whether they were playing games or snoring inside, it was all a technique to break down the other party’s psychological defenses.
“It’s an awkward time to sleep,” Huo Ranyin said nonchalantly, waving the file in his hand. “I’ll finish my work and take a nap at noon.”
“It’s good to be young, you don’t get tired. At my age, I have to sleep for a few hours to have any energy.”
Yuan Yue didn’t insist. He stretched and sat down next to Huo Ranyin. He was the first responder at the scene of the Wushan case and was now naturally a member of the special task force.
“Captain Yuan is still young,” Huo Ranyin said politely.
“I’m 5 years older than Ji Xun,” Yuan Yue smiled. “I’m 34, how is that young?”
Huo Ranyin’s heart stirred. “I heard that when Ji Xun joined the police force, he was under you? You trained him?”
“Don’t listen to their nonsense,” Yuan Yue said. “Ji Xun was indeed in my group when he first joined, but you can’t really say I trained him. That guy is an incredibly fast learner, born to do this job. When he was in the police academy, he solved a murder case within the academy. By the time the police arrived at the scene, the killer, the weapon, the time, method, and motive of the crime were all laid out. Impressive, right?”
Huo Ranyin’s lips twitched into a shadow of a smile.
“Yes, very impressive.”
After the interlude of conversation, Huo Ranyin went back to reading the files.
Time moved forward again. It wasn’t until eight in the morning, when the pre-trial officers were loudly eating a breakfast ten times more lavish than usual in front of Xu Xinran, that Xu Xinran licked his chapped lips and suddenly spoke: “Can I have a glass of water?”
The first step is always the hardest.
Once that first step was taken, the tightly sealed dam began to leak.
The pre-trial officers, full of energy, fulfilled Xu Xinran’s request and then began a rapid-fire assault. The interrogation got on track:
“What is your relationship with Tang Jinglong?”
“Just regular friends.”
“Regular friends? A regular friend paid off 800,000 of your gambling debts in five years? You have a pretty high standard for ‘regular friends’,” the interrogator chuckled.
“We just hit it off,” Xu Xinran added. “And Tang Jinglong was rich.”
“On January 19th at 20:43, at the medical equipment conference in Museum Garden on Xinglin Road, why did you say to Tang Jinglong, ‘The money you promised me, where is it’?” the interrogator threw out another question.
“That was money Tang Jinglong owed me. I thought he was going to renege on the debt, so I got anxious… But we cleared up the misunderstanding later. Tang Jinglong even withdrew 10,000 yuan for me on the spot.”
“One second you say Tang Jinglong was rich, the next you’re contradicting your statement?” the interrogator said. “Why did Tang Jinglong borrow money from you? Is there an IOU? Bank transfer records?”
“…”
“You go to Liangjingjing KTV often, right? The people there confessed. They’re still running a private casino, just more covertly and with bigger stakes. How did it feel to lose 150,000 in one night of high-stakes gambling there on December 8th of last year? You told the people at Liangjingjing that Tang Jinglong would come pay the bill, but Tang Jinglong never showed up. You must have panicked, right?”
“I—”
“Think before you speak,” the interrogator said coolly. “You’ll have to sign a statement later, guaranteeing that you’ve told the truth. If you’re caught lying and committing perjury, that’s called obstructing justice. A hundred lawyers won’t be able to help you.”
A string of questions, a mix of soft and hard tactics, left Xu Xinran momentarily silent.
Just then, the interrogator, who had been unhurried until now, suddenly slammed the table, raised his voice, and fired questions like a storm:
“Let me tell you what really happened on the night of the 19th! You’re a gambling addict. You lost 150,000 in one night and thought Tang Jinglong would cover this hole for you like before, but he didn’t. He just gave you 10,000 to send you away. So you held a grudge against him, and on the night of the 19th, you killed him and dismembered his body!”
“I didn’t! I was sleeping at home that night!”
Xu Xinran’s eyes widened. He shot up from his seat in agitation, only to be held back by the restraints on the chair. His face was flushed, and the veins on his forehead throbbed.
“Tang Jinglong did owe me money! That night he promised to give it to me the next day. The ten thousand was a deposit!”
That instantaneous reaction seemed genuine, not like a lie.
Huo Ranyin thought. Brief discussions broke out around him. The senior officers observing the interrogation basically confirmed this view, but police work ultimately relies on evidence. Whether it was Xu Xinran or not still required more investigation.
The only one who openly talked about intuition and wild guesses was Ji Xun.
Just then, the police officers who had gone to Xu Xinran’s house with a search warrant returned with the results:
No murder weapon was found in Xu Xinran’s home. The floor tiles in his house were not the patterned mosaic type. When they interviewed his upstairs and downstairs neighbors, they had not noticed any suspicious activity recently.
This was unfavorable news.
With grim faces, everyone continued to wait for the pre-trial team to break Xu Xinran.
After a few more rounds of confrontation inside, Xu Xinran was backed into a corner and suddenly blurted out, “I said I didn’t kill anyone! That money was really what Tang Jinglong owed me. Tang Jinglong asked me to perform an under-the-table surgery for him. The 150,000 was the surgical fee!”
“Who was the surgery for? Where did you perform it? Was the surgery a success or a failure?!” the interrogator fired off a series of questions.
“The surgery was very successful.” It was unknown which sore spot this sentence hit in Xu Xinran’s heart, but his face filled with anger. “You see I’m an attending physician and think I’m the type to fail at surgery? Let me tell you, if the Third Hospital truly ranked people by skill, the position of Chief of Urology would be mine today!”
Outside the interrogation room, the veteran criminal investigators exchanged a look, forming a preliminary conclusion about Xu Xinran’s personality:
He had some knowledge and some skill, but his psychological fortitude was weak, his ability to handle pressure was low. He always felt his talents were unrecognized. He was the type of suspect who, once he starts talking, can’t keep his mouth shut.
Sure enough, under the pre-trial team’s relentless questioning, Xu Xinran confessed everything: “On December 20th, I performed the surgery at Ning City Health Hospital. The patient was an eight-year-old boy with uremia who needed a kidney transplant. He was the same age as my son. I performed the surgery very carefully for him. The surgery was a complete success, with no complications. After the surgery, I even gave him a little yellow duck. He was very happy and said, ‘Thank you, Uncle.'”
“150,000 for one under-the-table surgery, and you didn’t think there was anything wrong?”
Xu Xinran was silent for a moment before saying reluctantly, “Maybe there was a problem with the source of the kidney, who knows. Anyway, I did my job. I performed the surgery, I took the money. Why should I care about anything else?”
The interrogator was furious. “Why should you care about anything else! Do you think this has nothing to do with you? Do kidneys just grow on trees? Kidneys grow inside human bodies! What does an unknown kidney source mean? It means it might have been taken from someone else, and in the future, it could be taken from me, from you, from your eight-year-old son!”
Xu Xinran lowered his head.
For the first time during the entire interrogation, he lowered his proudly held head.
A series of chairs scraping sounded. The news brought back by the police who searched Xu Xinran’s house could only prove that his home was not the dismemberment site. His alibi of being at home sleeping on the night of the incident had no witnesses and was not credible. He was still highly suspicious.
But what Xu Xinran had revealed gave the police a brand new direction for their investigation—Tang Jinglong’s involvement in organ trafficking.
At that moment, someone came in from outside and said that Xu Xinran’s lawyer had arrived and was demanding his client’s release.
The special task force discussed for a moment, and after consulting the pre-trial team’s opinion, they decided to end the interrogation for now. They let Xu Xinran leave with his lawyer and deployed police forces to investigate the lead Xu Xinran had provided.
Huo Ranyin left with the others, glancing at the time as he went: 08:30.
Excluding the long stalemate at the beginning, from the moment things really started, it had all been wrapped up in half an hour.
Like smashing rotten wood. The breakthrough had been swift.
Inside the interrogation room, Xu Xinran kept his head lowered for a long, long time. In an angle hidden from the surveillance cameras and unseen by the police, the corner of his mouth curled up.
A sly, triumphant smile flashed and disappeared.
