MISS MIAO WASN’T WRONG: The entrance to the Yancheng Municipal Bureau really was quite busy. Cars were parked all over, both legally and illegally. A parking officer holding a stack of tickets stared at all the vehicles in bemusement, uncertain whether to distribute them. Several employees stationed at the entrance recorded visitors to the building. Normally, only the most basic, chaotic local police stations got this many visitors.
Fei Du, who was following a group, somehow found himself part of the crowd too. He didn’t even need to say anything. Uninvolved in the hubbub, he noticed that the visitors varied in age and appearance; people from all walks of life seemed to have shown up. There were serious-looking middle-aged individuals, and there were elderly visitors with weathered faces. Some people carried photos, some looked like couples—and those visitors generally seemed much closer than regular couples, often holding hands and sticking close to each other, as though they had difficulty standing up alone. It was as though they had to support each other just to keep moving forward with uneven steps.
Every so often, a sudden sob burst from the crowd. Whenever that happened, everyone’s tired demeanor changed. Yet aside from Fei Du, the curious outsider, no one turned to locate the source of the cries. They all seemed to understand what was going on.
Fei Du’s brow furrowed. He had some sort of vague feeling. He often came to the municipal bureau and was familiar with the place by now, so he was able to slip into the building on his own with no one noticing. Just as he was considering making a phone call, he ran into Luo Wenzhou in front of a bathroom in a corner.
Luo Wenzhou’s prominent double eyelids had gained new creases from his all-nighter. He smelled strongly of smoke, but he’d just washed his face with cold water; droplets kept rolling down his face and neck to wet his collar and the front of his T-shirt, putting everything in view. Fei Du’s gaze surreptitiously followed the lines of Luo Wenzhou’s chest all the way down to his waist. If his eyeballs could have taken photos, he would’ve snapped more than a dozen close-ups of that moment.
Having looked his fill, Fei Du pushed his sunglasses up and started his speech like a gentleman. “Did you discover last night that there were cases before the one in Xiling?”
When it came to crime, no one was quicker on the uptake than Fei Du. Luo Wenzhou had no energy to be surprised by that anymore; he just nodded with exhaustion.
“This seems like a major undertaking.” Fei Du clasped his hands behind his back and glanced out the window. “It’s typically parents who come to these types of things. These parents seem to span a large age range, though. How far back did you guys dig?”
“Twenty-two years.” As soon as Luo Wenzhou heard himself speak, he thought he sounded a little hoarse. He cleared his throat forcefully. “Guo Fei was kidnapped in Lianhuashan twenty years ago, but similar victims and cases were already popping up two years before that. And even after Wu Guangchuan died, they never stopped.”
Fei Du took out a tin of mints and passed it to Luo Wenzhou.
“For now, we’re theorizing that this has been the work of a group.” Luo Wenzhou sighed. “There are plenty of lost-child cases of all kinds every year, and most of the kids are never found. We can only use blood samples or DNA and cross our fingers when someone reports a homeless child, or when a human-trafficking ring is caught. But we often never find children who go missing, dead or alive, so determining exactly what happened to them is very difficult. Usually, these cases are investigated locally wherever the missing child was reported, so by the time those cases get to us, they’re just in a year-end report. And as long as the statistics look okay, no one pays much attention.”
Fei Du reacted frighteningly quickly. “But even a few years ago, some old officers left from the Lianhuashan case should’ve been around, right? If even one or two cared as much as your shifu did, never forgetting that case, they could easily have picked up on something ages ago—unless the subsequent cases were missing a key element. That element was the kidnapper torturing the parents, right? In all the missing girls’ cases from Wu Guangchuan’s death until now, not a single phone call was made to torment the parents.”
Luo Wenzhou didn’t say anything, but he crushed the mint between his teeth.
“Let’s say a gang was using an innocent little girl as bait to get closer to their targets, then taking girls away without leaving a trace. They’d want to stay as inconspicuous as possible,” Fei Du pointed out. “Calling the victim’s family would be too personal; it wouldn’t benefit a group. The gang goes after preteen female victims, but the calls hurt the victims’ parents… Know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like the gang lost control of their bait.”
How come everyone else has what I don’t? Parents, family? Su Xiaolan must’ve wondered twenty years ago—and Su Luozhan must likewise wonder now. I have to destroy everything I can’t have.
The call Guo Heng had gotten had been made from a garbage dump in the middle of nowhere. The only road that went there had a toll gate. After several rounds of police investigation, it was clear that the caller had never gone through the toll gate. Rather, they’d apparently taken the highway, parked on the road, and climbed a large hill with the kidnapped girl, Guo Fei, to make that call.
The story didn’t really make sense, though, so the police working the case at the time didn’t take it as fact. But what if the girl in the call hadn’t been Guo Fei at all?
That girl in the call hadn’t spoken—only screamed. The source of a scream was actually very difficult to identify; it was even tricky to distinguish between the cries of men and women. It was the bells in the pencil case that had misled Guo Fei’s parents, convincing them that their daughter was screaming.
What if Guo Fei had already been dead by then, and the murderer drove with his little accomplice to the middle of nowhere, looking for a place to dump the body? What if, during that time, the girl finally couldn’t take the pressure anymore, ran away from the murderer, and came across a public phone? And what if she had happened to come up with a wicked idea?
Luo Wenzhou closed his eyes lightly, trying to imagine what could have been in the twisted mind of that little accomplice. Fear? Disgust? Disbelief? Or sick jealousy and hatred?
He realized he had no frame of reference.
It was like asking someone born in peacetime to imagine what it would be like if war broke out on their doorstep. Most people would think things like, I’d need to gather my valuables, How could I meet up with my loved ones? or How would I survive in the wilderness? They weren’t capable of envisioning a real armed conflict. Even with his extensive experience analyzing the motives of all kinds of bizarre criminals, Luo Wenzhou was essentially a mentally healthy adult male, so he could only approximate the girl’s state of mind with meaningless, unfeeling words.
If he was right about what had happened, why had there not been any similar cases in the twenty years following Wu Guangchuan’s death? Su Xiaolan all those years ago, Su Luozhan now—what was the connection between this abnormal mother and daughter?
“Can you sneak me in to speak to Su Luozhan?” Fei Du asked him.