Guo Heng only raised a hand to cover his eyes, crying soundlessly.
“Guo-shu…”
“That’s enough.” Guo Heng waved him off clumsily. “Stop trying so hard to find nice things to say just to comfort me, I beg you.”
Guo Heng had once been an impulsive, quick-tempered man, but he’d never been an idiot. He saw through such obvious lies. By rashly stabbing Wu Guangchuan, he’d made Su Xiaolan too scared to ever taunt the victims’ families like that again. In fact, she’d changed how she operated so that the girls she killed from that point on blended in with the multitudes of ordinary missing-person cases. Bringing her crimes to light had taken twenty whole years.
And it was all his fault.
“So where…where’s my Feifei now?”
“The main perpetrator of the early cases, Su Hui, wasn’t involved in her murder, so we suspect that Guo Fei was buried along the national highway that used to connect Lianhuashan and Yancheng.”
“Is it…is it possible to find her? Are you still looking?”
“It is,” said Luo Wenzhou. “People don’t disappear without a trace. She has to be somewhere; there’s always a clue to follow. Even if we don’t find her right now, there’s still hope for the future. And even if everyone else forgets, I’ll remember. Don’t worry.”
Guo Heng left the bureau in the morning. Luo Wenzhou saw him off, watching his back until it disappeared. He didn’t know what would become of Guo Heng, but whether you were sixty, seventy, or eighty, there was still a life to be lived, days to pass—you always had to look ahead. Luo Wenzhou wasn’t sure whether he was imagining it to make himself feel better, but it looked to him as though Guo Heng’s back was a little straighter than it had been when he first arrived.
At long last, Luo Wenzhou dragged his feet back to his office and slumped into his chair with a deep sigh. Then he was hit with the feeling that he’d forgotten something. Looking up, he saw a cup of cold coffee on his desk.
Oh, right! I asked Fei Du to wait for me!
Of course, the young master couldn’t possibly have waited at the station all night. Fei Du had probably left ages ago.
While Luo Wenzhou examined the cup of coffee, dazed, a hand appeared from next to him to claim it. The dark scent of woody cologne wafted from its sleeve and into Luo Wenzhou’s nostrils. He inhaled automatically. His nose felt a bit dry.
He didn’t know what luxury hotel Fei Du had emerged from, but the younger man wore a different suit now. Luo Wenzhou watched, befuddled, as he set takeout from the hotel—breakfasts and coffee—on the desk.
“You have way too much time on your hands,” Luo Wenzhou blurted out. “Always staying at a hotel instead of going home… Do you own the place or something?”
“You could say that,” Fei Du replied. “I hold a sixty percent stake in it.”
Only an asshole would come and show off generational wealth in front of a salaried worker, Luo Wenzhou thought.
“Didn’t you ask me to wait for you? Did you have something to discuss with me?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Luo Wenzhou opened the lid of his coffee and took a large gulp, hoping the caffeine would help him find his missing brain. “I wanted to talk to you about…”
What had it been again? Luo Wenzhou stopped, shocked to find a gap in his memory. However hard he searched, he came up blank—not a word, not even a punctuation mark. It felt like the first sign of Alzheimer’s.
Fei Du’s white shirt blurred before his eyes. He was starting to see double. “I need to tell you…”
Before Fei Du’s eyes, Luo Wenzhou mumbled a few more words in his apparent fugue state, then slumped against the back of his chair, fast asleep. Fei Du hurried to rescue the coffee cup from his hand before it could fall to the floor. That done, he arranged Luo Wenzhou’s hand in a more comfortable position.
Frowning slightly in his slumber, Luo Wenzhou looked haggard. His exhausted eyelids were wrinkled into three layers, stubble covered his usually clean-shaven chin, and his face seemed shrunken, giving him the air of a depressed uncle. Working nonstop for forty-eight hours would have reduced even a heavenly immortal to exhaustion; of course Luo Wenzhou looked worse for wear. Yet somehow, when his usual suave and princely demeanor was gone, something sturdier and more distinguished emerged.
Leaning sideways against the desk, Fei Du held Luo Wenzhou’s chin between two fingers. He turned Luo Wenzhou’s face gently this way and that, studying it closely the way an antique collector might examine priceless Song dynasty Ru ware. After a moment, he straightened up and sighed inaudibly, admitting to himself that this face indeed touched his heart.
Just then, Lang Qiao strode in, her steps as heavy as if she were dragging a dead dog along behind her. She was so tired she thought she could have fallen asleep lying in the middle of the road—until the sight that awaited her in the chief’s office banished any trace of sleep from her mind. Every dirty little novel she’d ever read about an arrogant, overbearing CEO flashed vividly before her eyes. The young beauty of the police squad stood gaping in the doorway, zombified.
To her surprise, the “degenerate CEO” inside the office didn’t panic at all, merely turned, blinked at her, then offered her an exceptionally ambiguous smile. He pointed at the large bag of food and gestured for her to help herself, then filched Luo Wenzhou’s half-empty cup of coffee, took a sip, and drifted out of the room.