Luo Wenzhou gave Tao Ran a look. “You’re wasted, and you still remember her name?”
“I listened to the old man tell this story so many times, I could recite it in my sleep.”
“How’d she go missing?” Chang Ning couldn’t help but ask curiously. She was usually busy with work; she rarely had time to even watch TV, let alone enjoy other forms of entertainment. Now, she’d been presented with a couple of police officers who could tell the story in person.
“Back then, parents didn’t look out for their kids the way they do now,” Tao Ran explained. “Eleven- or twelve-year-olds were considered old enough for parents to be hands-off. If they wanted to go somewhere, they’d just tell their family and then run off. Parents didn’t follow their kids everywhere. But this girl, Guo Fei, was very well-behaved. She went to school and came home at the same time every day. If she was five minutes late, she’d have a reason. Her family never had to worry about her studies. Nothing special happened the day she went missing. According to her classmates, she didn’t stay behind after school; she went home right on time, as usual. It was a fifteen-minute walk from the school to her home, but somewhere along the way, she disappeared.
“My shifu traced her steps dozens of times. There were no security cameras at the time, but there also weren’t any hiding spots on her way home. It was summer, so she went home when it was still light out, and plenty of people were around. Someone would typically have noticed something if a child her age was kidnapped on the street. But after conducting interview after interview, my shifu’s team came up empty. They searched the entire area around the school and didn’t find a single hair. Doesn’t Sherlock Holmes have that famous saying? ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’2 So some people said that she’d been kidnapped by someone she knew—a friend or a relative, maybe—or that she’d run away from home.
“Her running away would probably have been the best-case scenario. She didn’t have much money on her, so she’d have returned in a day or two. Anyway, the police initially looked into people she had close relationships with: teachers, school staff, the Guos’ friends and relatives. They even looked at the owner of the stationery store she frequented and the local supermarket’s cashiers… The police summoned hundreds of people for questioning, but they always came up empty.” Tao Ran paused for a moment, then continued, “Just when they were reaching their wits’ end, the girl’s father, Guo Heng, suddenly got a call. No one spoke on the other end, but a little girl was screaming in agony. When his wife heard, she passed out immediately. The police used the phone number to locate the phone that placed the call, and it was in a booth in a very remote area.”
“Weren’t there cameras?” Lang Qiao asked, confused.
“Do you think the streets were full of security cameras back then?” Luo Wenzhou asked. “Besides, the phone booth was next to a garbage dump, and the workers there didn’t even know it was still in use. They found a little blood next to the phone booth. It matched Guo Fei’s blood type. At the time, though, there wasn’t DNA testing, so they couldn’t confirm that it was hers. And they never found useful fingerprints.”
For a while, no one in the living room spoke. Eventually, Fei Du—who’d been silent for a long time—asked, “Was that the only call? Was there no extortion or ransom?”
“None,” said Tao Ran. “After that call, the kidnapper never contacted the girl’s family again.”
Fei Du swirled his wine slowly and absently inhaled its fragrance as if it were a glass of Romanée-Conti rather than a dry red Lang Qiao had picked at random in the supermarket. “That’s weird,” he said. “It sounds like the kidnapper wasn’t after the child and instead wanted to torment the parents. What did they do for a living?”
“Guo Heng taught junior high. His wife was a low-level government worker. By the standards of the time, they were pretty well-off, but they were still just an ordinary family who survived on a basic monthly salary—definitely not rich. Both her parents were well-educated, sensible, and not very ambitious. They had good relationships with their coworkers—there didn’t seem to be any conflict there. And there were no extramarital affairs.”
An ordinary family with ordinary parents and an ordinary daughter… Guo Fei hadn’t even been a particularly beautiful girl. The entire family lived a conventional, straitlaced life, as plain and unremarkable as a standard hotel room. Even digging as hard as they did, the police couldn’t find anything notable. “Flies won’t sting an uncracked egg,” as the saying went, but the police had gone through all of the Guo family’s relations—they’d even taken a magnifying glass to some rather personal matters—and in the end, they concluded that the family was as crack-free as an egg could be.
Time went on, and they never heard from the kidnapper again. Both the police and the girl’s family knew that the odds of getting her back were slim. If she was lucky, she had been sold off somewhere remote, but it was more likely that she was already dead.
The police had no idea why Guo Fei had been chosen. It was like the mysterious kidnapper had simply tossed a die into the street and taken whomever it fell closest to. It was senseless.
“So…did the same thing happen to those other five kids?” Lang Qiao asked.