That jolted Luo Wenzhou from his musings. Of course not. What kind of question is that?
About to refuse, he looked up to see Fei Du leaning against the wall across the hall, gazing silently at him. Luo Wenzhou rarely noticed Fei Du’s gaze—adults seldom stared endlessly into each other’s eyes unless they were in love or about to fight. And in Luo Wenzhou’s memory, Fei Du’s eyes were usually icy, taunting, or cynical, every last eyelash screaming “I don’t like you!” He’d never seemed as quiet or harmless as he now did. In fact, Luo Wenzhou almost thought he’d detected a hint of gentleness in the way Fei Du said “sneak.” He paused and found that the “Bullshit. Stop kidding around” just wouldn’t make its way out of his mouth.
Cursing his weakness as a man, Luo Wenzhou sighed, but he couldn’t help the way his own tone softened. “I’m afraid that would be against regulations.”
“Last time, you let me listen to an interrogation—”
“My boss made a special exception.”
“Ask him to make one again. After all, I’ve spoken directly to Su Luozhan before.” Fei Du’s trademark cynical half smile returned to his face. “Besides, I wrote a little essay about the study of victims, and a professor who noticed it included it in the bibliography of the third edition of his textbook. Oh, right—and in April, I got accepted into Yancheng Public Security University’s applied-psychology postgraduate program. By September, I might be halfway to a role on your team. Want to call your previously-very-flexible boss, Sergeant Luo?”
Luo Wenzhou stared at him. When the fuck did all that happen?!
If Fei Du’s brain had suddenly gone offline—if he’d started racing his car illegally through the downtown core, and Luo Wenzhou had to go and arrest the driver himself, even that would have been much more believable than what Fei Du was saying now.
Luo Wenzhou’s temples wouldn’t stop throbbing. His brain’s overloaded CPU, which had only just cooled, seemed at risk of catching fire again. If Fei Du had been accepted in April, then regardless of how rich or connected he was, he would’ve had to start preparing to apply last year.
Had he woken up one day and devoted himself to academia? Was this a case of acute boredom? Was he doing this in pursuit of Tao Ran? Or had he realized he was tired of this materialistic lifestyle?
At that moment, downstairs—perhaps because it was a bit crowded—someone accidentally knocked a photo a middle-aged woman had been holding to the floor. She hurried to grab it, but a sudden gust of wind blew it even farther away. This was clearly an inconsequential accident, but to a sensitive enough person, it came off as a bad omen. The woman melted down, stumbling to the floor and starting to wail.
Her hoarse-yet-piercing cries ascended straight through the air to stab through the cracks around the hallway windows. In the middle of this unsettling cacophony, an officer from the forensics team jogged over. “Sergeant Luo, the results from the sample you brought yesterday are out! That’s Qu Tong’s blood on the fabric!”
Luo Wenzhou sucked in a breath. He looked at Fei Du for a while, then walked to Deputy Lu’s office without another word.
Twenty minutes later, Fei Du got the green light. He walked into the room where Su Luozhan had been put temporarily with two boxes of ice cream and placed them on the small table. “Want some? Which flavor?”
Su Luozhan looked at him. After a moment’s hesitation, she pointed at the strawberry ice cream.
Fei Du handed her the strawberry ice cream and took the other box for himself. Then he pulled out a pair of earphones and plugged them into his phone. He pulled up a live stream of a soccer match, crossed his legs, and watched as he ate, ignoring her. The pair sat for a while in silence.
Su Luozhan stayed quiet at first, not really making eye contact with him. Halfway through her ice cream, she realized that Fei Du had no intention of speaking, which finally made her curious enough to look at him. Her gaze swept over Fei Du’s shirt and phone before landing on the wrist resting on the table.
For a while, Su Luozhan studied his watch, her head tilted. “Is your watch legit?”
Fei Du didn’t react at all. Maybe he hadn’t heard her. Su Luozhan waited a bit, then reached over and lightly knocked twice on the table, right next to his phone.
Finally startled enough to notice her, Fei Du pulled out one earphone. “Hm? What’s up?”
The volume on his phone was really loud; the announcer’s shouts leaked out into the quiet room. Su Luozhan bit on her plastic spoon. “What are you here for? Aren’t you going to question me?”
“Oh, my colleagues are busy. They asked me to keep an eye on you for a while.” Fei Du seemed unwilling to look away from the phone screen. He sounded incredibly distracted, and he only kept his gaze on her for a second before returning to the game.
When people asked her questions, the girl pretended to be stupid, but when they didn’t pay attention to her, she seemed dissatisfied. At first, she restricted herself to occasional glances at Fei Du, but after finishing her ice cream, she stared at him and started asking questions. “You’re a police officer too?”
“Intern,” Fei Du drawled.
“Do interns have a lot of money?” Su Luozhan raised an eyebrow the same way an adult might have. “Is your watch real, or is it a high-quality dupe?”
Fei Du seemed to find her question very funny. First, he raised a brow in surprise; then, at last, he couldn’t contain his laughter. “You know what a ‘high-quality dupe’ is? Kid, who taught you that?”
Su Luozhan’s expression darkened immediately. She was clearly offended that he was taking her lightly due to her age. This was exactly how this man with the injured left arm had treated her back at the old apartment too. It was like he didn’t believe she could do anything, didn’t believe that she could pose a threat.
She realized that although she felt smug when she got away with her lies, that feeling never lasted long. The point of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing was to eat a sheep; it was no fun endlessly playing the sheep, especially when someone was treating her like one. Su Luozhan bit her lip, carefully assessing whether this man was actually indifferent to her or just pretending. After a while, she couldn’t resist tossing out bait. “Those uncles taught me.”
Fei Du paused but didn’t ask her which “uncles.” “It’ll be fine from here on out,” he said kindly, but still in a coddling, dismissive manner. “Don’t worry.”
That threw Su Luozhan off, driving her to ask, “You’re saying I’m not in any trouble?”
“I’m saying no more bad guys will harm you. As for the consequences you’re going to face, we’ll have to see. But your crime wasn’t serious, and you’re too young to face criminal charges. You’ll probably just be taken into custody for a while and then rehabilitated.” Fei Du mulled it over, then finally paused his damned soccer stream, as though remembering his duty as a police officer. He stared at Su Luozhan with beautiful peach-blossom eyes, but when he opened his mouth again, he said the same things that came out of every adult’s mouth. “You kids really need to stop being so trusting. You don’t even know when you’re being used by a bad guy. But what’s past is past, kid. When you’re out of here, you’ll have to study hard. Don’t fill your head with nonsense. You have your entire life ahead of you…”