Chapter 7
“IF WE FOLLOW THIS LINE OF THINKING,” Lang Qiao said somberly, her dark circles nearly as big as her eyes, “then either Wu Guangchuan crawled out of the morgue, or we caught the wrong person twenty years ago, and the real culprit is resuming their crimes.”
“Someone successfully kidnaps six girls, and the police find neither hide nor hair of them. Then they do just as the kidnapper wants and find themselves a scapegoat. Even a normal person would become abnormally smug at that point—never mind someone who was abnormal to begin with. Would they really have stayed quiet all these years?” Luo Wenzhou shook his head. “If we did catch the wrong person, the actual kidnapper would’ve killed thousands over the last two decades.”
Lang Qiao turned to him. “Your words are scaring me, Sergeant Luo.”
“Right back at you.” Luo Wenzhou twirled the pen in his hand. “Either way, I’ve asked to have someone keep an eye on Qu Tong’s place. We’ll start by looking into who left the memory card.”
“I mean, we might not be able to find anything,” Lang Qiao pointed out. “I just asked, and Qu Tong lives in an old neighborhood where the residents are often late with their property-management fees. There isn’t even a security guard, so their building is basically wide open to strangers round the clock. Just last month, a neighbor was robbed. If we couldn’t even find a robber, how will we find someone who just dropped something off?”
“Could we use other clues?” asked Tao Ran.
“It’s a common memory card—a domestically produced knockoff. There are hundreds of pages of the exact same product online. It was clean too—not a single fingerprint. As for the recording itself, the digital forensics team is doing their best to analyze it, but the culprit knew how to cover their tracks.” Luo Wenzhou shook his head. “It’s not looking good.”
They weren’t likely to find any leads. It was equally unlikely that the girl was still alive. The optimal period for a rescue—the first seventy-two hours—had already passed. In light of that, the recording the girl’s parents had received seemed most like a smug victory lap, a way to say, I’m still here, I’m still the winner, and you guys can’t catch me.
“There’s actually another possibility,” Tao Ran said after some thought. “Who could’ve passed the girl that night? We checked the security cameras at the nearby scenic areas and parks, plus at all major roads and highways. If the person who took the girl was just passing by coincidentally, there’d have been some sign of him, but we still haven’t found any such leads. Is it possible that he wasn’t just passing by? That he was actually following Qu Tong—or another kid about the same age on the bus—and just happened to encounter this hijacking? I don’t know why else he’d have been so careful to avoid all cameras.”
Lang Qiao caught on immediately. “Following someone doesn’t yield results right away. It had to have been going on for a while!”
On the last day of the summer camp, the students went on a field trip to the outskirts of the city, but before that, they’d only had activities near the school. If the mysterious kidnapper was following a student, he’d have had a much harder time hiding within the city. He could have been caught on a traffic camera or noticed by a neighbor at any time.
Lang Qiao jumped to her feet. “I’ll arrange a search right away!”
But Luo Wenzhou waved her off. “I already did. Sit down. After we investigated the crime scene that night, and didn’t find anyone suspicious, I asked them to trace the movements of the girls in the class. Eleven of the eighteen are girls, and they’re all around Qu Tong’s age. Six have features and builds that are pretty similar to hers. Even if we only focus on those six, though, they’d have collectively come in contact with thousands of people. And all we know from the crime scene is that the suspect’s shoe size is a seven or eight. That’s not enough information. The suspect is most likely male, but we can’t rule out the possibility that it’s a woman. In terms of appearance, we don’t even know the suspect’s silhouette, so it’s not realistic to go look at people one by one.”
Listening to this from the side, Lu Youliang heaved a sigh. He knew that, even if he’d been the one making all the decisions on this case, he couldn’t have done better than Luo Wenzhou. Yet Qu Tong still went missing. This unfortunate turn of events seemed almost fated.
“Back in the day, the kidnapper called victims’ families directly. But now that they know we can look up calls, they’ve switched to untraceable ways of delivering a message. They’re sure keeping up with the times.” Lang Qiao sighed too. “Is this like…‘God works hard, but the devil works harder’?”
Luo Wenzhou thought about it. “The victims were never found back then, dead or alive,” he said suddenly. “So how did we ultimately determine that Wu Guangchuan was the culprit? Because he had bloody clothes in his possession?”
“No. We didn’t handle the case strictly by the book. But we didn’t act lawlessly either,” said Deputy Lu. “What confirmed that Wu Guangchuan was the culprit, beyond the clothes, was the seventh girl. There were signs that she’d been sexually assaulted, and after she woke up, she identified the culprit. What was her name? Su something, I think… Su…”
“Su Xiaolan,” Tao Ran supplied. “My shifu mentioned her name in his notebook. She was Wu Guangchuan’s student.”
“Yes. That’s it.” Deputy Lu thought for a long time, but the details beyond that were still hazy. He sighed. “It’s been too long, and my brain isn’t as good as it used to be. I can’t remember much anymore. Might as well get the file.”
Luo Wenzhou kicked the oblivious Lang Qiao, who promptly ran off to complete the necessary paperwork.
Since the request came from Deputy Lu himself, the old file was pulled up quickly. They brushed twenty years’ worth of dust off the notes, which turned out to be much more detailed and objective than Yang-lao’s. Finally, the case was seeing the light of day again.
“Yes. This girl.” Deputy Lu pulled out a photo. Yang-lao’s journal hadn’t contained a photo of Su Xiaolan; she was still alive and probably hadn’t wanted to be bothered. This was Luo Wenzhou and Tao Ran’s first time seeing the seventh victim.
She was an undeniably pretty girl. The long, elegant corners of her almond eyes angled upward toward her temples. When the photo was taken, she had a little makeup on, and her white teeth stood out against her red lips. Her cheek in her hand, she looked into the camera. Something about her was strangely precocious.
“Su Xiaolan attended Brocade Junior High. During this case, she was in the eighth grade.”