Chapter 20
WHEN LUO WENZHOU WALKED OUT of the interrogation room, he felt almost delirious. Long, intense interrogations were torturous for both parties, especially when it came to suspects with as much mental fortitude as Xu Wenchao. To keep up the pressure on the suspect, Luo Wenzhou couldn’t give himself room to breathe either.
The officers out in the field were still searching for supporting evidence, while in here, the interrogator and interrogated had been engaged in a battle of wits, trickery, and deduction, armed only with their observations of each other’s expressions and the subtext in each other’s words.
How much evidence do they have? How much did Su Luozhan tell them?
Where did he contradict himself? Which statements could be true, and which did he phrase to mislead us?
Are they trying to trick me?
How do we trick him into confessing?
Easing up the slightest bit would’ve given Xu Wenchao room to make excuses and retract things. At this point, the organ above Luo Wenzhou’s neck had turned in for the night. He relied entirely on muscle memory to guide himself back to his office.
Qu Tong’s parents had rushed to Binhai the second they heard the news, heedless of all attempts to stop them. Now only Guo Heng remained. When Luo Wenzhou saw him lying there, turned away, he assumed the man was asleep and automatically softened his footfalls. He picked up a nearby uniform jacket to cover him, but as he approached, Guo Heng looked over.
The wavy lines of wrinkles bracketing his eyes began at the bridge of his nose and extended all the way to his temples. They looked like cracks in parched earth. The yellowing whites of his eyes were reddened, shrouded in cobwebs of blood vessels, but there was no hint of sleep within them.
The criminal investigation team’s offices, usually noisy, were now silent. The employees were either out in the field or out cold from exhaustion. As the two men regarded each other in silence, the air around them seemed to congeal into a thick, stagnant glue that not even the strongest air conditioning could blow away.
After a long time, Guo Heng spoke. He did so with difficulty. “Your…your boss, Mr. Lu…he told me everything.”
Luo Wenzhou slowly pulled up a chair and sat facing him.
“Not in detail,” Guo Heng clarified. “He said that your team was still verifying facts about the case. But can you tell me exactly what’s going on now?”
Luo Wenzhou paused for a moment, then started from the beginning. “That summer twenty years ago, Guo Fei happened to meet a girl who said she’d come to Lianhuashan with her teacher. She was very pretty and wore a floral dress. But she seemed bad with directions; every time Guo Fei ‘ran into’ her, she was lost. One day, after cram school, Guo Fei bumped into her again. This time, the girl looked frantic. She said that her teacher was in the hospital and that she couldn’t find her way back to the hotel. Guo Fei was a kindhearted child—Lianhuashan Elementary School still has her old report cards on file, and every semester, teachers called her altruistic. She tried to give the other girl directions, but she just didn’t understand them. Since it was only a brief detour, and she didn’t think it would make her too late, Guo Fei decided to take the other girl there herself…”
From the moment Luo Wenzhou said the name “Guo Fei,” Guo Heng had been shaking uncontrollably. Murky tears slipped from the corners of his eyes; impeded by wrinkle upon wrinkle, they rolled into the white hair at his temples. Luo Wenzhou paused, putting his hand on Guo Heng’s shoulder. The old man’s frail back, and the uneven rise and fall of his chest, gave the impression of a broken set of ancient bellows.
Guo Heng took a long, difficult breath. “Go on. Please go on.”
“That girl was Su Xiaolan. She tricked Guo Fei into consuming a spiked drink, then left her at the hotel to wait till Wu Guangchuan, the perpetrator, left the hospital. Wu Guangchuan was faking an illness as an excuse to get away from the other teachers, and he’d been given a school car to use. After killing Guo Fei, Wu Guangchuan hid her in the trunk and left Lianhuashan. Su Xiaolan took Guo Fei’s pencil case.”
Luo Wenzhou knew—from Su Xiaolan’s diary, and based on the Su family’s modus operandi—that Su Xiaolan herself had probably killed Guo Fei. He didn’t know whether Guo Heng could handle that information, however, so he carefully twisted the truth into a neat little bow.
“Su Xiaolan had a perverse relationship with the killer,” he continued in a factual, formal tone. “That made her very jealous of Guo Fei. Thus, she and the killer had an altercation while driving. She got out of the car in a fit of rage and ran across that hill you found. When she saw the public phone by the garbage dump, she thought of a way to vent her anger: by calling you and letting you hear that scream, and the sound of the bells in the pencil case jangling.”
“Why…why did she…”
“She was jealous that Guo Fei had parents like yourselves. That she had a happy family, that she would’ve grown into a young lady a thousand times better than Su Xiaolan and that she would’ve had things that Su Xiaolan would never have even if she lived another twenty years.”
Guo Heng looked at Luo Wenzhou, momentarily speechless.
“You didn’t kill the wrong person, Guo-shu. You were just…too kind ever to suspect the other person in the room,” Luo Wenzhou said softly. “But when you killed Wu Guangchuan in front of Su Xiaolan, it shocked her into finally realizing that her actions had consequences. She went on to live a twisted and painful life but committed far fewer crimes. In a way, you saved many potential victims—at least a hundred.”