Chapter 21

“I personally think...” Yan Dongcheng said hesitantly, “I think Bai Yong’s cause of death was not homicide, so in my mind, the Bai Yong case has not yet been closed. The person you want to date, in my view, has many suspicious points. Of course, I do not deny that she is a very outstanding woman, provided that she did not commit a crime.”

“Captain Yan, you still suspect her?” Wang Rui asked in surprise. “Is there solid evidence?”

“No. Just intuition.”

“Your intuition has always been very accurate, but this time, I think your judgment is wrong.”

“At present, I cannot produce evidence to convince you. I only hope that in terms of personal feelings, you will be cautious and not make a hasty decision.”

“You’re thinking farther than I am,” Wang Rui said with a mocking smile. “I only want to invite her to dinner. I have no further hopes for now.”

“What do you plan to invite her to eat, Sanfuzhai, Lao Huang Ji?”

“I haven’t thought it through yet. Otherwise, should we go eat Western food, or Japanese food?”

“Wang Rui,” Yan Dongcheng looked steadily at Wang Rui and said seriously, “you asked for my opinion. My opinion is, don’t go provoke her!”

“You’re overthinking it, Captain Yan. I also majored in criminal investigation, please believe in my professional standards. If I discover anything suspicious during future contact with her, I will absolutely not ignore it or hide it.”

“Believe me, you will definitely discover suspicious points.”

“She seems like a puzzle, maybe that is exactly what attracts me.”

“So you and I are solving the puzzle in different ways? If you let feelings develop however they will, can you guarantee that when the truth is revealed one day, you won’t be sad or disappointed, won’t shed a single tear?”

“I think she hasn’t hidden anything. Some women are born with a mysterious aura. If I had to say she hid something, at most it was some unpleasantness between middle school classmates that she doesn’t want to bring up again, or maybe she simply forgot. I don’t believe she has done anything bad.”

“In that case,” Yan Dongcheng stood up and walked toward the office desk, “I won’t force you.”

He pulled out the chair and sat down, opened his own laptop, and fixed his eyes on the screen.

Wang Rui gathered the takeout boxes from the coffee table into a trash bag, wiped the tabletop clean with tissues, and walked out without saying a word.

“Wang Rui,” Yan Dongcheng called out loudly, “come here.”

“Hm?” Wang Rui put the trash bag by the door and turned back.

Yan Dongcheng turned the computer screen around.
Wang Rui leaned in curiously. On the screen was a concert ticket sales page.

“Rather than invite her to dinner,” Yan Dongcheng said, “invite her to this concert. The success rate will be higher.”

“Tchaikovsky, she likes classical music?”

“She should.”

“Okay, then I’ll buy the tickets now!” Wang Rui was a little excited.

“Call her first and ask. If she agrees, it won’t be too late to buy the tickets.”

“Right! I’ll go make a call first...”
Wang Rui strode out.

He was embarrassed to call in front of Yan Dongcheng, so after going downstairs to the courtyard, he found a quiet corner and took out his phone.

Yan Dongcheng sat in front of the computer and casually opened the concert seating page.
For the weekend performance, there were not many tickets left, all of them upstairs third-class seats. @more great reads, at Jinjiang Literature City

There were two empty seats in the center of the fifth row of the main hall, probably because the person who had bought them earlier returned the tickets. Yan Dongcheng hurriedly clicked to buy them...

If Wang Rui followed his own idea and invited Bian Ranxin to dinner, he would most likely be rejected by Bian Ranxin.

Yan Dongcheng understood people like Bian Ranxin, going out to eat was not enjoyment for her.
Unless it was absolutely necessary and she had no choice, she would never make herself suffer by accompanying someone she had no real acquaintance with to a meal.

From the dedicated seat in her office, and from the way she used wet tissues to wipe her fingers, she had a certain degree of cleanliness obsession.
Many common foods she did not eat, such as animal offal, chili, curry, scallions, ginger, garlic...

If conditions allowed, on such nights she would sit alone in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, eating udon noodles she had cooked herself, gazing at the night sky.

She lived in a high-rise building in the city, but somewhere she had a vacation cottage, with white walls, snow-white sheets, and a pair of mint-green armchairs placed at the foot of the bed.

The sheer white curtains were open. Outside the double glass doors, the lake water had frozen thickly, and the snow-covered mountain peaks across the lake were blanketed in white.

Leaving aside the suspicion of murder, she was a lovely woman, with her own rich inner world, and she did not place worldly preferences in her eyes.

That was Yan Dongcheng’s understanding of her so far.

Yan Dongcheng asked himself whether giving Wang Rui this advice and suggesting that he invite her to a concert carried any selfish motive.

He wanted to understand her hidden side too much.
Once a puzzle appeared, he was like a computer with a preset program, endlessly performing calculations. He could not stop until he solved the puzzle.
He did not believe his intuition would be wrong.

And there was another possibility, at this moment.
If, in the end, it turned out that the case had nothing to do with her, would he secretly regret that the person who invited her to the concert was Wang Rui and not himself?

“Captain Yan,” Wang Rui came in excitedly, “she agreed!”

“Good, I bought the tickets for you.”

“Haha, thank you! Just now I was still muttering to myself, if the tickets sold out, how would I explain it to her...” @more great reads, at Jinjiang Literature City

“Almost sold out, I just managed to grab returned tickets.”

“Captain Yan, you really can foresee things. When I called her, she didn’t seem to remember me. I said I was your assistant, and only then did she remember.”

“But as soon as I mentioned a Tchaikovsky special concert, she immediately became interested and asked whether the performers were the orchestra...”

“I hadn’t been paying attention to the ticket page just now, and I answered that it seemed to be. She happily said, ‘That’s great’...”

As Wang Rui spoke, he looked at the concert details and found that he himself had guessed correctly.

“It went very smoothly, congratulations,” Yan Dongcheng said.

“Do I need to wear formal clothes to a concert? Will she mind?”

“Be a little more formal. If you’re completely unkempt, she definitely won’t like it, but dressing too much is not okay either.”

“Oh? She’s a picky person?”

“Yes, very picky. She may even be picky about food, dislike noise... she is not an easy person to get along with.”

“I’m really getting a little nervous now!”
Wang Rui straightened up and tugged at the sports jacket on his body.

“My inference may not be accurate.”

Wang Rui became interested and kept pressing Yan Dongcheng with questions, asking how to win Bian Ranxin’s favor within the limited time of a concert.

Yan Dongcheng suggested that he bring alcohol spray and cotton pads, and first wipe down her seat after entering the theater.

“She may bring her own disposable seat cover or something like that,” Yan Dongcheng said.

“Cleanliness obsession?” Wang Rui laughed. “I also have cleanliness habits, it’s fine.”

“That’s not called cleanliness obsession. That’s called liking to be clean. You haven’t met a person with real cleanliness obsession.”

Wang Rui did not take it seriously.
However, on the way home that night, he still detoured into a pharmacy and bought alcohol cotton pads.

Sunday was a day off, and Wang Rui spent the whole day at home playing Tchaikovsky pieces, intending to get to the point where no matter which passage played, he could immediately say the title.

On Monday at work, he devoted himself to his duties, but when eating in the cafeteria at noon, he still could not resist bringing up the upcoming concert...

“Oh, Wang Rui,” Ma Dajie from the archives room saw through it, “you’ve got a girlfriend, right? You must be going to the concert with your girlfriend!”

“No, just an ordinary friend.”
Wang Rui’s face carried a smile he could not hide.

“Hmph, you can’t hide it from big sister! A girl attracts a hundred suitors, Wang Rui, you’re a man attracting a hundred suitors. A few days ago, a friend asked me to introduce his younger sister to you. I was thinking of finding a chance to tell you, but it looks like I was too late!”

“Please don’t tease me...” Wang Rui was a little embarrassed.

“I’m not joking,” Ma Dajie said in a loud voice, “the other side seriously asked me to do it! But since you already have a girlfriend, I’ll hurry and tell the other side, so I won’t delay the girl!”

“Sorry, big sister, I’ve caused you trouble.”
Wang Rui apologized helplessly, not even knowing what he had done wrong.

Ning Yuan, sitting not far away, listened quietly to their conversation and looked up at Wang Rui uneasily.
Just then her eyes met his. She blinked and lowered her head, and her jet-black side-swept bangs covered her face.

Wang Rui hurriedly finished his meal and stood up to leave the cafeteria. As he passed the flower bed outside the cafeteria, he suddenly heard Xiao Yuan’s voice from behind him.

“Wang Rui,” Xiao Yuan jogged up, “wait for me!”

“Xiao Yuan,” Wang Rui said with a smile, “don’t pry into private matters. I won’t tell you.”

“No, I want to ask you, do girls all like listening to concerts? Really?”

“I’m not sure. I originally thought inviting her to dinner would be better.”

“No, inviting her to dinner has a low success rate!”
Xiao Yuan pushed up the side of his glasses and shook his head in an old-fashioned way.

“You know a lot, huh. Have you asked out a lot of girls at school?”

“I just have more failure experience.”

“If you fail a few more times, you’ll get used to it.”

“Shouldn’t you be comforting me by saying, ‘Failure is the mother of success’?”

“All kinds of success have their own different mothers. Failure only accidentally becomes the mother of one kind of success, and does not have universality.”

“Wow,” Xiao Yuan covered his chest and pretended to vomit blood, “telling the truth is so hurtful...”

The two of them joked all the way back to the office, and Wang Rui immediately put on his headphones to listen to his classical music.

Xiao Yuan stood in front of the office partition in a daze.
After a while, he seemed to have made up his mind, stamped his foot, and walked out.

The forensic department’s office building was usually very quiet, everyone stayed in their own laboratories, unlike the criminal investigation department, where someone was always busy coming and going.

At lunchtime, it was even quieter here.
Xiao Yuan quietly came to the door of Ning Yuan’s laboratory, hesitating whether to knock, when the door suddenly opened.

“Xiao Yuan?” Ning Yuan looked at him strangely. “What is it? Looking for who?” @more great reads, at Jinjiang Literature City

“No, nothing.”

“Oh.”
Ning Yuan walked straight down the corridor, her spotless white lab coat, its hem lifting in the wind, like fluttering wings.

“Ning Yuan,” Xiao Yuan caught up with her, “I have two tickets to a weekend concert. Do you want to go listen together?”