Fei Du struggled out of his grasp. His speech sped up as he retorted, “Sergeant Luo, can you please try to evolve from a Neanderthal to a civilized human?”
Luo Wenzhou ignored him. He slid the hand on the nape of Fei Du’s neck a few inches forward until a finger landed on Fei Du’s carotid artery. “You’re not feeling great, are you? I think I read somewhere that coffee and alcohol don’t mix.”
Once again, Fei Du was silent.
Luo Wenzhou looked at him and sighed. “That’s just like you. You can’t handle people being good to you or mistreating you. You’re harder to serve than Empress Dowager Cixi.”
“My apologies… I wasn’t aware that you’d served Her Majesty,” Fei Du said dryly.
Luo Wenzhou flicked the side of Fei Du’s neck, then picked up his phone and went outside to call a driver.
Tao Ran was completely unaware of the treacherous quarrel happening under his own roof. A few glasses of wine had incapacitated him, and he didn’t get up until the light of the setting sun had thoroughly saturated the ground. That was when he rose, completely parched.
As he expected, all his guests had already left. Before leaving, though, they had politely cleaned up his apartment, which had been in a sad state.
In his new home, Tao Ran washed his face, then spotted two notes on the fridge. One was from Luo Wenzhou, telling him that the leftovers were in the fridge, and that he should reheat them when he got up. The other was from Fei Du, and it was rather long. Tao Ran had to rub his eyes for a while before he could clearly read what it said.
Fei Du had written that when he took Chenchen to buy her exercise book, he’d felt like someone was following them. It hadn’t been clear whether that person was actually targeting Chenchen, or Fei Du was just being anxious. Just in case, though, he’d asked that Tao Ran visit Unit 1101 to see Chenchen’s parents and remind them to monitor their child’s safety during the summer break. He also reminded Tao Ran to bring a little something along and thank the beauty who’d blessed his new place with her presence.
Those busybodies. They’d even managed to learn the girl’s unit number. Tao Ran burst into laughter.
A second later, though, he reread Fei Du’s description of the suspected stalker, and his smile gradually froze. His gaze drifted out the window. Abundant vegetation grew in this old neighborhood, and the shrubbery was interspersed with dense conifers. From upstairs, it was impossible to see much of anything. It seemed quiet and peaceful.
Tao Ran walked to the little cabinet and flipped through the old police officer’s notebook. On the inside cover was an old ID photo that showed the owner when he was younger. He’d had a buzz cut and a square face, and he stared into the camera with a solemn expression. Next to the photo, his name—Yang Zhengfeng—was written in a lively, elaborate script.
On the pages labeled “Lianhuashan Serial Kidnapping Case,” the title had been circled in red. Tao Ran knew that meant that to his shifu, the case had never ended. The pages held notes from when Yang Zhengfeng had illegally followed Wu Guangchuan, eavesdropping on his conversations. That had gone on for half a month, and every day, Tao Ran’s shifu had just written Nothing to note.
In the middle of the page was a row of text: His colleagues have verified that Wu Guangchuan stayed in the hospital for two days due to a severe cold while recruiting students in Lianhuashan. That was when the victim, Guo Fei, went missing. That’s also been confirmed by the hospital. It is unclear when Wu Guangchuan could have committed the crime.
Tao Ran poured himself a warm cup of water, slowly getting his thoughts in order. Apparently, Wu Guangchuan had been over six feet tall, making him quite a large man. A little girl would have had to look up to see his face. In their teenage years, children began to go through puberty, becoming more aware of, and more sensitive toward, gender and sexual differences. An unfamiliar man, even a teacher, would probably need to interact with a girl frequently over a long period of time to gain her trust. Had Wu Guangchuan had the time and opportunity to do so during his hospital stay?
Deep in thought, Tao Ran lost his grip on the notebook. It fell shut, and a little note slid out from the back pages. It was in Tao Ran’s own writing. He’d written down a radio channel, followed by the words Midnight, Zero Degree Reading.
The old officer Yang Zhengfeng had been stabbed to death by a wanted criminal three years ago. Prior to that, he’d risen through the ranks as he got older, and he already transitioned away from his role as a frontline criminal investigation officer to a managerial position quite a few years before his death. Back then, Luo Wenzhou had heard through the grapevine that Yang Zhangfeng was about to be promoted to deputy director of the municipal bureau, and they’d planned on milking a fat meal from the old man.
Their shifu hadn’t even been killed during a shift. He’d taken two weeks off to see his child off to an out-of-town university, and upon his return home, he intended, perhaps, to spend the last day of his vacation as a stay-at-home husband. He’d set off to the local market bright and early. While walking by an underpass, he’d seen an apparently unstable homeless person who looked very anxious, glaring fiercely at anyone who dared look at him for a second too long. Yang Zhengfeng sensed from the man’s movements that he was getting ready to attack somebody, so he kept an eye on the man. When he got a better look, he recognized the homeless man as a highly wanted criminal who was on the run after stabbing his next-door neighbors, a family of four.
The suspect was clearly in an unstable state, so Yang Zhengfeng didn’t dare act rashly—he surreptitiously contacted a colleague instead. Unfortunately, an old lady happened to walk past them with her dog. Perhaps sensing danger, the puppy barked wildly at the suspect, alarming him; the suspect shouted, pulled a knife out of nowhere, and ran at the old woman. Yang Zhengfeng was forced to intervene, and the deranged man stabbed him more than a dozen times.
Tao Ran had been the officer on duty that day, so he arrived at the scene first, and he just barely had a chance to speak to Yang-lao one last time. Strangely, Yang Zhengfeng hadn’t used his final words to ask whether the culprit had been caught, or to request that Tao Ran care for his wife and kid. Instead, he grabbed Tao Ran’s hand and kept repeating, “Tune in to…eighty-eight point six…at five after twelve… Eighty-eight point six…”
That was a local radio channel—88.6 FM. A program called “Zero Degree Reading” had run every night at five minutes past midnight. That program had eventually stopped airing, evolving into a niche phone app that steadily played a variety of audiobooks every day, their contents invariably boring. He’d once mentioned it to Fei Du, who’d joked that the app would be a great cure for insomnia.
Tao Ran often had to work late shifts, so he didn’t have a regular sleep schedule. But when he occasionally had trouble falling asleep, he’d listen to one of those weird audiobooks. Yet he’d never noticed anything abnormal about the radio program or the app beyond their soporific effects. He’d often suspected that he misunderstood his shifu’s last words, but now he happened to notice the username “The Reciter.”
Grabbing his almost-dead phone, Tao Ran opened the Zero Degree Reading app. He tapped a review he’d saved for The Red and the Black; the author of the review was “The Reciter.” The first sentence read, “Then who will eat at the same table as me?” That question lies at the very core of the character.
Coincidentally, the culprit in the May twentieth case had been Zhao Haochang. Because of his connection to the Zhang family, Zhao Haochang had received a great opportunity that should’ve gone to one of his colleagues, coming to lead the Fei Corporation’s team of legal counsel. That opportunity had come with a promotion to tier-two partner, and on the day Zhao Haochang went to the Fei Corporation to sign the contract, he stole Fei Du’s fountain pen to commemorate the event. The phrase Zhao Haochang had labeled the pen with was who will eat at the same table as me?
It was too eerie a coincidence, but Tao Ran couldn’t tell anyone that. They would say that he’d been involved in the case for too long and was starting to see it in everything. The problem was that this wasn’t the first time Tao Ran had experienced such déjà vu involving The Reciter.
When Tao Ran’s shifu had passed away, clutching his hand, had he really just brought up a boring reading program? Maybe Tao Ran had heard him wrong and was just further deluding himself that something strange was going on with Zero Degree Reading. Maybe his paranoia had gotten to the point that he now over-analyzed every little coincidence.
Tao Ran had been a police officer for over seven years; he knew that situations like that were common. If a person harbored enough suspicions, even their memories could lie to them. Plenty of people who’d witnessed a violent crime were afterward unable to say whether the culprit had been male or female, tall or short. Over the years, Tao Ran had flipped through the old officer’s notebook countless times, trying to find any clue at all that would help him decipher his shifu’s last words. He’d never found such a clue, although he could now recite the notebook from memory.
Tao Ran sighed, shaking his head self-deprecatingly. Maybe he needed to go talk to their workplace therapist.
Suddenly, an update notification appeared in the upper-right corner of the app. Tao Ran took a half-hearted glance, and then his eyes widened. The update was titled Wanderer, have you found your lost pearl?—rereading Lolita.4 Submitted by The Reciter.