CM | Chapter 68

Gu Yao rode all the way home in Zhu Shengxi’s car.

It was already past midnight, but Gu Yao still had no sleepiness at all. Halfway through the drive, she even asked Zhu Shengxi what he and Xu Shuo had talked about just now, after all, she still remembered the street-side beating of the day before all too clearly.

Zhu Shengxi said in an even tone, “I just hoped that if he was going to do something dangerous, he wouldn’t drag anyone else into it.”

The “someone else” he meant, of course, was Gu Yao.

Gu Yao said, “You misunderstood. I was the one who asked him out today. I had something I needed his help with.”

Zhu Shengxi let out a soft sigh and raised the partition between the back seat and the driver’s seat before asking, “If you need help with something, you can come to me. Xu Shuo is just an outsider.”

The moment those words fell, Gu Yao was silent for a long time. She kept looking out the window. Only after a while did she draw her gaze back and meet Zhu Shengxi’s eyes beside her.

There was no light in the back seat, only the streetlights spilling in through the window and a sliver of moonlight.

They could not make out each other’s eyes.

When Gu Yao spoke again, she said, “You’re my boyfriend. When this happened, shouldn’t you have reflected on yourself first? Why would your girlfriend have to ask an outsider for help, rather believe in that unreliable lawyer in your eyes, and not want to tell you even half a word more?”

Zhu Shengxi said nothing. Not even his expression changed in the slightest, as if he were simply accepting the accusation in silence.

Gu Yao continued, “I thought that after you had someone teach him a lesson before, you would feel at least a little guilty and regretful about it. But you didn’t. I thought that when you saw me today, you’d ask why I was taken to the police station, but you didn’t. Still, none of that matters. I do have one question I want answered, though, who told you that I had been questioned at the police station?”

This time, Zhu Shengxi was silent for only a moment before answering, “Du Tong.”

That was surprising, and yet somehow not.

Gu Yao could not help a cold laugh. “She’s been watching me?”

Zhu Shengxi shook his head. “She has a friend in that precinct. That friend knows about your relationship with me and just wanted to let me know out of good intentions.”

Gu Yao said, “Friend? Who is it?”

Zhu Shengxi said, “I don’t know.”

Gu Yao did not believe him at all.

But she also knew that if Zhu Shengxi did not want to say it, she would not be able to pry it out of him.

She also did not want to get tangled up in this matter any further, since she would know sooner or later anyway.

Thinking of that, Gu Yao turned her head away again, as if she no longer wanted to talk.

But Zhu Shengxi spoke instead. “Just now you said you thought I’d feel a little guilty and regretful if I had someone teach Xu Shuo a lesson. I don’t.”

Gu Yao froze, her brows knitting together, but her body did not move.

Zhu Shengxi said, “In this matter, I don’t think I need those two emotions. I had someone teach him a lesson because he deserved it. Because he had bad intentions toward you, because he meant you no good, because he stirred up so much trouble with motives that were anything but pure, and even wanted to use the opportunity to go after Jiangcheng Gene. Being able to tolerate him until now is already a sign of restraint on my part.”

Gu Yao drew in a breath and slowly closed her eyes.

Zhu Shengxi kept looking at her profile, his voice low. “As for what you said, that you thought I would ask why you went to the police station, I didn’t ask. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. It’s just that in my heart, no matter why you were taken to the police station, I would come over and take you home. And after what happened yesterday, I also don’t think you would tell me the truth. I figured it would be better to leave you some personal space. You said you had something to investigate. You said you had something you needed Xu Shuo’s help with. But if that matter is dangerous, then from my point of view, I would definitely get involved. If he drags you into more trouble again, next time I won’t just have someone teach him a lesson. It won’t be that simple.”

At that, Gu Yao finally turned back, staring at him in shock and disbelief.

Zhu Shengxi did not avoid her gaze. He only looked straight into her eyes and murmured, “You have never looked at me like this before.”

Gu Yao did not take up the thread.

What shocked her was not that Zhu Shengxi was capable of doing something even more ruthless than what he had done yesterday, but that he now could not even be bothered to pretend in front of her.

After a long moment, Gu Yao finally said softly, “Actually, I’m very grateful that he showed up. He let me see you clearly.”

Zhu Shengxi paused. His lips moved, but in the end, he still did not speak.

Gu Yao said, “During this past year, I always felt that this kind of life was very good, but also a little unreal, because everything was too perfect… If Xu Shuo hadn’t appeared, I never would have imagined that the person sleeping beside me was like this.”

Zhu Shengxi seemed to let out a sigh, slowly turning to look out the window as he asked, “If you’d known a year ago, when you had just woken up, that this was the real me, would you still have been willing to accept me?”

Gu Yao did not answer.

It was not that she did not know the “correct answer,” she just did not know how to answer.

Not until the car drove into the underground garage of their residential complex and stopped by the elevator entrance leading upstairs.

Gu Yao silently pushed open the door and got out.

Only when the car door shut with a thud did Zhu Shengxi lean forward slightly and knock on the partition.

As the car drove off, Gu Yao stood in the elevator lobby, watching the vehicle leave through the mirrored door. Her cold expression was reflected in the same mirror.

Maybe, her relationship with Zhu Shengxi had reached the point where it needed adjusting.

Gu Yao rode the elevator upstairs. Back home, she only switched on one floor lamp in the living room, then took a bottle of mineral water from the fridge and drank half of it in one go before finally catching her breath.

Her phone, lying on the side table, suddenly lit up. Gu Yao picked it up and saw a WeChat message from Xu Shuo.

“Got home?”

Gu Yao replied with a single character. “Mm.”

Xu Shuo: “Then rest early. If you still want to keep investigating Zhang Yuan’s past tomorrow, call me.”

Gu Yao stared at that line for a while and said, “If that skeleton really is Zhang Yuan’s, when will the forensic lab have news at the earliest?”

“They’ll have to extract DNA from the bones and teeth, then compare it with her relatives. Or they’ll need to do a 3D craniofacial reconstruction and skull-face superimposition on the bones to restore what she looked like when she was alive, then check whether it matches Zhang Yuan’s photos from before. But either way, it will take several days. It won’t be that fast.”

Gu Yao said, “Oh, right. Didn’t you take photos at the scene today? Send me a copy first.”

Xu Shuo: “You’re still not planning to sleep?”

“I got such a huge shock today. Anyway, I can’t sleep, so I might as well think about the case.” Gu Yao thought for a moment, then added, “Tomorrow at ten in the morning, I’ll go to the office to find you.”

Xu Shuo sent back a helpless emoji and said, “As you command, fairy.”

Gu Yao stared at that emoji, then looked at the word “fairy,” and could not help but smile with her lips pressed together.

This was probably the first sincere smile she’d had all night, but it only stayed at the corner of her mouth for a moment before fading quickly.

Xu Shuo soon sent over the photos he had taken, including shots of the crime scene, the skeleton, Zhang Yuan’s notebook, and images of those four photos.

In order to see the details in the pictures more clearly, Gu Yao imported them into her laptop and spent more than two hours studying them in the study.

The crime scene was very “tidy.” Aside from the dust accumulated from no one going into the cellar to clean for five years, none of the objects had been knocked over or dropped to the floor. There were no signs of struggle or wrestling near the bones either. That meant Zhang Yuan had not resisted before she died. She had simply fallen to the ground, perhaps with some convulsions, but nothing severe.

The blade beside the skeleton should have been the murder weapon, but for such a small blade to kill someone, the only way was to go after an artery.

Then, was Zhang Yuan’s death a suicide or a homicide? If it was homicide, the person who did it had to be Feng Zhenghui. So why would Feng Zhenghui kill Zhang Yuan?

There were only two possible reasons. First, Feng Zhenghui questioned Zhang Yuan and learned all about the humiliation Chen Yumin suffered before her disappearance, even finding out that her disappearance was related to these five people, and in a burst of rage he struck. Second, Feng Zhenghui did not learn anything at all. Zhang Yuan truly knew nothing, and had only participated in the persecution of Chen Yumin. But since Feng Zhenghui had already detained Zhang Yuan, he could not possibly let her go, because if she got out, she would definitely report it to the police.

But judging from the current situation, both reasons had contradictions. If Feng Zhenghui really had gotten the whole story out of Zhang Yuan, he absolutely would not have let Zhang Yuan die so easily. He would have torn her limb from limb before he could vent his anger. On the flip side, if Feng Zhenghui killed Zhang Yuan because he was afraid she would go out and call the police, then why didn’t he take one more step and dispose of the body? Leaving a skeleton in the cellar was just putting the most unfavorable evidence against him in plain sight.

Thinking of this, Gu Yao sighed.

After going around in circles, analyzing it from every angle, the truth still seemed closer to her first instinct at the scene today, Feng Zhenghui was not the killer who murdered Zhang Yuan.

Then, was Zhang Yuan a suicide?

Frowning, Gu Yao set the photos aside and picked up the scan of the notebook again, flipping through it from beginning to end.

This should have been the notebook Zhang Yuan used after she was locked in the cellar. The dates and events of each day were written down clearly.

But in such a cramped and unchanging environment as the cellar, what could even happen? Zhang Yuan’s records were very simple too, mostly just waking up, eating, pleading with Feng Zhenghui, sleeping, crying, these unchanging “itineraries.”

But the notebook mentioned one detail they had overlooked at the crime scene today.

That was, in the corner where the inner room and outer room of the cellar connected, a metal ring had been installed into the wall, with an iron chain on it, used to bind Zhang Yuan’s feet.

Gu Yao thought carefully for a moment, then picked up the scene photos from earlier again. She had not seen any iron chain at all. There was, however, a patch of mottled discoloration on the wall. If she had not guessed wrong, that should have been left behind by the pried-off ring.

In other words, Zhang Yuan had been locked up while alive, and the length of that chain was just enough for her to move between the outer room and the inner room, which was why her washing supplies were kept in the outer room and the bed was in the inner room.

Gu Yao kept thinking as she continued flipping through the notebook, but the more she looked, the more wrong it felt.

When she had just read the first few entries, she had not noticed it, because Zhang Yuan had written like this: “I begged him to let me go, but he ignored me and just gave me food before leaving.”

If a sentence like that only appeared in the first few days, it was still reasonable. But when it seemed to copy and paste itself into every day’s notes, that was terrifying!

Gu Yao flipped faster and faster, counting the days as she went. Zhang Yuan’s handwriting also became more and more scribbled. On some pages, she had even crumpled the paper halfway through writing, and the strokes were broken off.

For more than half a year, day after day, it was always like this. Feng Zhenghui brought food down, then left. There was not a single conversation between him and Zhang Yuan!

By this point, Gu Yao was already chilled to the bone.

She closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair, imagining that scene, Zhang Yuan going from helpless crying and shouting at the beginning, to despair deeper than death, to a breakdown and madness later on. But the person imprisoning her neither abused her physically nor provoked her with words. He simply refused to say a single word to her.

Whether human or animal, no one can live alone. Every living thing on this earth needs communication. If you trap a person in a world all by herself, with no one else and no end in sight, then that person will definitely go mad.

This kind of mental torture was far more terrifying than physical pain.

Gu Yao could even imagine that during this process, Zhang Yuan must have taken the initiative to say many things to Feng Zhenghui, begging him, confessing, telling him everything she knew about Chen Yumin.

But none of those words were what Feng Zhenghui wanted to hear.

Feng Zhenghui only gave her a notebook. Zhang Yuan was terrified of losing track of time, so she persisted in recording every day, but later on, her mind had become extremely fragile. She no longer even wanted to write down the time and what she had done that day. To continue recording her “life” for half a year, and for every day to be the same, was also torture for her.

Feng Zhenghui’s move was truly ruthless!

At the same time, on the outskirts of the southern district.

Xia Ming led a team out on another call. This time, the location was a sewage outlet outside a factory. By the time they arrived, it was already three in the morning. The factory’s manager and several workers came up quickly at the sound of the sirens and explained the situation.

It turned out that this factory had recently been leaking wastewater. Nearby residents had complained, and the relevant departments had come to inspect it. They confirmed that the wastewater really had polluted the nearby water source, causing a large number of residents to feel unwell, and if it continued, it could even cause cancer.

The factory was facing huge compensation claims. The manager was so busy he was at his wit’s end. Aside from hiring lawyers, he spent all day running around apologizing to residents and negotiating compensation amounts.

Of course, when it came to repairing the wastewater pipes, he did not dare be careless either. He had called in several companies one after another to inspect the site, and it was only this afternoon that work finally began.

The repair work lasted ten hours. The manager kept offering more money and insisting that the workers patch it up overnight. Who knew that by midnight, the workers who were in the middle of the job would suddenly climb back up one after another, each face pale as death, as if they had seen some toxic water monster.

Only when one worker told the manager that they had found a blockage down below, and that the blockage was a burlap sack containing a corpse…

This was enough to scare the manager half to death. He could not care about anything else and hurriedly called the police!

Xia Ming and his team put on protective suits and went down into the pipe together with the forensic doctor and the lab tech. Led by the workers, it took them a bit of effort to find the burlap sack.

The sack had been washed farther inside by the water and was jammed into a dead end. If not for that, it might have been swept even deeper, and then it would have been hard to find.

Around the burlap sack was nothing but sludge, wastewater, and trash washed along by the water. Which of it had anything to do with the corpse inside the sack and which of it did not would all need to be taken back and tested together.

By the time Xia Ming climbed back out of the pipe and took off his protective suit, he could finally let out a long breath. Quite a few team members already felt unwell and had gone off to the side to get some air.

Two female corpses in one night, Jiangcheng was not going to be peaceful!

Xia Ming drank some water, then went over to the forensic doctor and asked, “Can you estimate the victim’s approximate time of death now?”

The forensic doctor said, “For now we can only make a rough estimate. She should have been dead for three or four days. Because the body was hidden in a wastewater pipe, there are still plenty of rats and venomous insects inside, and the wastewater is also corrosive to the corpse, so the decomposition is faster than it would be in a normal environment. The burlap sack can also retain heat, which speeds up the breeding of corpse insects. But for the exact time, we still need to take the wastewater back and test its composition before we can determine it.”

Xia Ming frowned as he listened to the forensic doctor and the lab tech report their findings, while also looking around and thinking through all the possibilities of the case. By the time the forensic doctor and the lab tech had both left, Xia Ming was still at the scene, leaning against the car, saying nothing.

The female corpse’s face had already rotted away. Part of it was due to decomposition, and part of it was because rats had gnawed it. Because the woman’s head was closer to the opening of the burlap sack, the rats had bitten into the corpse’s face first.

The clothes on the body were remarkably intact. Although the wastewater had washed some of the color out, it was still not hard to tell that they were expensive. She must have lived well when she was alive.

This was obviously not the first crime scene. Judging from her clothes, she looked like a resident of Jiangcheng city, while the people living in this area were generally simple and plain.

So who killed her, and who transported her body here?

If the factory’s wastewater pipe had not suddenly developed a problem and needed repairs, this corpse probably would not have been discovered so soon.

Xia Ming stood in the wind for a while longer, then drove back with the team. Tonight, the whole unit would be staying up all night, and both cases were major ones at that. This had not happened in the southern district for more than ten years!

Back at his desk, Xia Ming lit a cigarette and said nothing.

Only after smoking half of it did he suddenly move, take his phone out of his pants pocket, and toss it onto the desk.

There were three WeChat messages on the screen.

He snuffed out the cigarette, unlocked the screen, and quickly saw Du Tong’s messages.

“Why did Gu Yao go to your bureau tonight?”

“What case?”

“Reply when you see this.”

Xia Ming took a deep breath, then turned off the phone again and pressed it face-down on the desk, starting to sort through the two cases from tonight.

Only when the sky had begun to lighten did Xia Ming close the case files, tell everyone in the team to go home and rest, eat breakfast, and come back later, and divide the team into two groups, one to investigate the skeleton case at the old Li residence, the other to investigate the female corpse in the wastewater channel.

Taking advantage of the break, Xia Ming also went home for a bit.

He lived not far from the police team. By the time he got home, it was just past five. His old father, Xia Yongzhi, had already gotten up. The old man was only in his fifties, but he looked sixty-something. His hair had gone white early, and quickly too. His face was full of wrinkles, and even his back was not very straight.

When Xia Ming went in, Xia Yongzhi was warming millet porridge in the kitchen. Hearing the noise, he rasped out, “Xiaoming’s back, huh? Breakfast will be ready right away!”

Xia Yongzhi was experienced enough to know that if Xia Ming hadn’t come home all night, then he had run into a case. When dawn came, he would definitely come back to take a look, or Xia Ming would not feel at ease.

Xia Ming followed him into the kitchen, took over Xia Yongzhi’s territory, rolled up his sleeves, and quickly made two breakfast dishes. He fried eggs, warmed some steamed buns, sliced a few pieces of ham, and was about to mix a cold side dish when he noticed two lunch boxes in the fridge, both filled with pickled radish strips.

Xia Ming carried the breakfast out and asked as he set the table, “Did Uncle Liu send over more side dishes again?”

Xia Yongzhi said, “Yep, your Aunt Liu’s handiwork. She knows you like them, so she made a bit extra this time. Take one box back to the team later, it’ll go well with rice.”

Xia Ming hummed and sat down to eat breakfast.

But less than a minute later, he spoke again. “Two cases came in last night, one skeleton, one female corpse.”

Xia Yongzhi’s chopsticks paused. “You just focus on the team. Don’t mind me.”

Xia Ming went on, “The skeleton case is related to that Feng Zhenghui from last year. As for the female corpse, she was found in a wastewater pipe.”

Xia Yongzhi frowned. “If it’s Feng Zhenghui, then the skeleton should be from four or five years ago.”

“Yeah.” Xia Ming nodded, then said, “Dad, I remember you once told me about a case, maybe from more than ten years ago, where the body was also dumped in a wastewater channel?”

Xia Yongzhi said, “Not a wastewater channel, just an ordinary sewer. By the time we found him, he was already a skeleton. He was a boy in his teens, grew up in an orphanage, and was later adopted, but not long after that he was killed. We still haven’t found the killer to this day…”

At that, Xia Yongzhi asked, “Why did you suddenly think to ask about that? Do you think these two cases are related?”

Xia Ming paused. “I also remember you said that the knot on that boy’s body was tied in a very unusual way. Wasn’t it called a surgical knot?”

Xia Yongzhi said, “Right. Put simply, it’s the kind of knot surgeons use when stitching up a patient’s wound. That kind of knot doesn’t come undone easily.”

Xia Ming said nothing.

If he had not seen wrong, the knot used on the female corpse hauled up from the wastewater channel today was also that kind.