WHILE THOSE TWO wasted each other’s time, Tao Ran—who was sitting in front of the security monitor—was already taking a nap. Awakening to Fei Du’s long lecture, he rubbed his eyes. “God, it’s Fei Du speaking in that tone? I totally thought you’d taken over his body or something!”
Luo Wenzhou kicked his chair.
Tao Ran stood to wake himself up, passing his hand over his face. He leaned in closer to listen to Fei Du’s lengthy-yet-useless rant for a while longer, then smiled. “You guys stopped fighting recently. That’s good.”
Luo Wenzhou glanced up at him lazily. “What is there to fight about?”
“Who knows?” Tao Ran chuckled. “I’m not the one who turns into a bristling cat every time I see a certain someone. I’m not the one who argued with him the entire way back from the Huashi District Bureau. Oh, right—and you even asked someone to ticket him.”
Luo Wenzhou held his tongue.
“I’ve told you,” Tao Ran said with a sigh, assuming the role of mediator out of habit, “Fei Du’s a good kid. If you treat him well, he’ll silently repay you tenfold. His tongue’s a bit sharp, I’ll give you that, but on a lot of things, he won’t fight with you. If that weren’t true, he wouldn’t have forgiven you about that sports car so easily.”
Tao Ran expected Luo Wenzhou to respond with a scoff when he finished speaking, but after a long pause, all Luo Wenzhou said was, “Mm.”
Tao Ran blinked. Had Luo Wenzhou just accepted what he’d said—that humbly? Had the sun risen from the west that morning?
Suddenly, on the security feed, Su Luozhan stood up. She leaned forward over the little table, the movement interrupting Fei Du’s lecture. “Do you think I was only being used?” she asked quietly.
“Xu Wenchao has already been arrested,” Fei Du told her gravely. “We still have some questions, but I’m sure we’ll get things out of him soon enough.”
Su Luozhan smiled mysteriously.
“If you want to accuse him, of course…” Fei Du paused, then shook his head with a smile. “Never mind. You accusing him wouldn’t be any use. Is there anything else you want to eat? I’ll ask someone to go buy it.”
Su Luozhan ignored the question. “How come it’d be no use?” she pressed.
“Because you’re a kid,” Fei Du said, as if it were obvious. “Children can’t testify. And this is a very serious case. If you did say something, they wouldn’t believe you, and even if they did, you still couldn’t go testify in court. But you know, little girl, I still have to say something. However scared you are, it’s wrong to harm other kids. You were holding a knife when we found you. Do you know how dangerous that is? If you weren’t careful, you could’ve made a mistake and—”
Su Luozhan cut him off. “What if not killing her was the mistake?”
Fei Du froze.
Su Luozhan twirled a lock of her hair and looked at him with a half smile, a hunter waiting for her prey to take the bait. “You’re so handsome, Gege.”
Fei Du turned “serious.” He pushed his phone aside and looked at Su Luozhan, his posture very proper. “I know it’s hard for some children who’ve been harmed to accept that they’re victims. You might’ve been misled into thinking that only bad guys are cool or capable, and that all victims are soft and stupid, and they deserve it. You might blindly imitate bad guys, but—”
“Victims are soft and stupid, and they deserve it.” Su Luozhan made a face at him. “They’re like lambs—they only know how to bleat. They’re dumb and so easy to lead away. They scream when you touch them and die when you kill them. They’re absolutely useless.”
Fei Du furrowed his brow as he stared at Su Luozhan in shock and anger. “How could you think that?!”
The moment he had started treating her like a stupid child and trying to “educate” her, malicious impatience had seized Su Luozhan’s heart. She wanted to rip that gentle face open. Only just now, when his expression changed, had her impatience dissipated slightly. For some reason, she felt a little pleased.
“Either way, I won’t be sentenced, right?” Su Luozhan continued, looking at Fei Du smugly. “Those lambs are so stupid. They’ll believe anything. You get close once, and the second time, they treat you as a friend. They’ll go anywhere you take them.” She let out a short laugh. “How funny!”
“Su Luozhan,” Fei Du said, his lips trembling slightly, “don’t speak such nonsense!”
Su Luozhan hadn’t gotten a chance to see Qu Tong’s parents receive that recording, but just thinking about it made her heart itch. Her eyes lit up with excitement as she incorporated this young “intern’s” pain and disbelief into her mental picture. “It’s not nonsense,” she said, her toes kicking the floor innocently. “That’s what my mom taught me. She said that when other animals are in danger, they either fight or run, but lambs just freeze when they get scared, then follow whoever calls them. But my mother was a lamb too. And she was an idiot. I read her diary in secret, and when she was about my age, she got scared too. After that, she never dared to leave her signature again.”
“What signature…?”
Su Luozhan playfully held a hand next to her head as if she were holding a phone receiver. “After the ‘knight’ who protected her died, she was too scared to do it.”
“Knight?”
“Gross, right? He was actually just a ‘dinner guest’ she was close to.” Suo Luozhan chuckled disdainfully. “Our family lives by hunting prey, but my mother didn’t know how to do anything other than catch lambs, and once she got older, she couldn’t even do that anymore. She had to rely on me… Hmph. And now she’s finally dead.”
“Enough,” Fei Du said with great difficulty. “Stop. How old are you?”
Su Luozhan smiled at him. “I knew how to do it by age seven. My mother served the guests the lambs I caught. Sometimes she made me go hunt with those guests, and after the guests had their fill, I’d take the lambs home. What happened next wasn’t any of the guests’ business—my mother would take care of the lambs. She learned that from her own mother.”
Outside, watching the camera feed, Luo Wenzhou stood up. “Go look into Su Xiaolan’s alcoholic mother!” Lang Qiao, who’d just walked in the door, heard that command and ran straight back out.
All Tao Ran’s sleepiness had evaporated. “What…? Is that kid saying Su Xiaolan’s mother made a living off sexually trafficking girls, and Wu Guangchuan was just her client? And why is it that she didn’t say anything when we talked to her, but when Fei Du talks to her, she can’t resist volunteering all this information?”
“You guys treated her like a suspect, the way a cop would,” Luo Wenzhou said quietly, focused on the screen. “But Fei Du treated her like an innocent child. He adopted the attitude of a parent, so subconsciously, she wanted to ‘send him a recording.’”
Only Fei Du could keep her talking—not because he’d been a troubled youth himself, but because he alone had displayed the right attitude after they arrested Su Luozhan.
“Impossible.” Fei Du stood up suddenly, accidentally bumping the little wooden table. It fell back to the floor with a heavy bang. “Wu Guangchuan was the culprit all those years ago, and he was killed by the relative of one of his victims. No such kidnapping has happened since…”
He suddenly stopped, eyes widening, as though he’d just thought of something terrifying.
“You just didn’t know about the next ones,” Su Luozhan said, savoring his expression. “But that uncle wasn’t innocent anyway. My mother liked him, but he was a huge asshole. Mom wasn’t enough for him; he still thought about those stupid lambs. She was blind with jealousy, so she thought of a fun new ‘signature.’”
“Have you got the same kind of relationship with Xu Wenchao?”
“No way!” Su Luozhan shrieked, then added in a mocking tone, “Would he be worthy of that? What is he? He’s just a last-minute cleaner at most!”
Fei Du suddenly raised his voice. “Then why did you send that recording to Qu Tong’s home?!”
Su Luozhan propped her arms on the chair’s armrests, giggling. “Because it was fun.”
“Boss! The name of Su Xiaolan’s mother was Su Hui. She wasn’t in the workforce long before her office closed. While she was at home after losing her job, she became an alcoholic. At one point, she opened a gambling parlor—and she owned a secondhand truck.”