Chapter 38

Chapter 38 Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Luxury of Conscience.

“Now this is strange.”

With a rustling sound, Wang Lai shook his cup a few times, poured the overnight water onto the pothos plant by the office window, and pulled a packet of instant coffee from his drawer. “Have you all watched the footage exported from the bodycam? Jian Qing rushing into the encirclement happened exactly at the same second Shi Hong locked the warehouse door—it’s like he had X-ray vision.”

His skills were also beautiful. If you cut it out alone, you’d think it was a movie being filmed.

“Where? Where?”

Full of curiosity, Song Xiaotong leaned toward Wang Lai’s computer, repeatedly scrubbing the timeline, and gave her judgment: “...I think it’s more like telepathy.”

Zhou Shan, who was listening in, laughed. “Telepathy? Even if they’re not twins?”

“Who knows? After all, there is a blood relation.” If you take a step back, it’s still more reliable than Brother Wang’s X-ray vision.

Recalling the appearance of that Ms. Ning from yesterday, Song Xiaotong sighed in admiration. “No wonder Boss Jian is so good-looking. His mother must be a great beauty.”

Unable to reach an agreement with the juniors, Wang Lai chose to pull in a senior. “Captain Yan, what do you think?”

“What do I think?” Yan Qiuyu said word by word with a smile. “I think recent training drills have indeed been a bit lacking. Sitting in the office every day, physical fitness and combat skills need to keep up too.”

Luckily Jian Qing was one of their own; otherwise, being bypassed around the encirclement would be really embarrassing for everyone.

Wang Lai: …

Having been notoriously weak in his studies since school, he decisively changed the topic and stretched his neck to look outside in a very pretentious manner. “Huh? Has He Fox not arrived yet?”

“Clap, clap.”

Pushing open the half-closed office door, the man whose name had just been called clapped lazily. “What a brilliant case of deflecting blame.”

Wang Lai, completely unashamed: Speak of the devil.

His cursed mouth.

Although there had been a few small incidents in between, solving a premeditated murder kidnapping case within half a day was, across the entire province, an efficiency worthy of praise.

Unable to catch the getaway bus, Qian Weiqiang tossed and turned all night, finally realizing he was the only one who had blood on his hands. In the interrogation room, he cried bitterly:

“Officer.”

“I was forced.”

“Shi Hong, Shi Hong threatened me with a knife, and Zhao Gang was on her side too,” with stubble covering his chin, Qian Weiqiang looked exhausted and defeated. “I had no choice. I really had no choice.”

He Linfeng, however, was completely unmoved. “You were the one who first contacted Shi Hong?”

“Yes.” Knowing he needed to show some honesty while shifting responsibility onto others, Qian Weiqiang nodded in admission, then hurriedly explained, “But I didn’t know at the time she planned to kidnap a developer’s child. I thought she just wanted to vent anger at most—maybe just splash paint on the company gates or something.”

“During that period, I had just been laid off, and I still had to borrow money here and there to pay my mortgage. Maybe it was shared misery… after hearing Shi Hong and her daughter’s story, I was bewitched and got on the wrong ship.”

Saying this, Qian Weiqiang’s eyes were full of remorse. “Actually, I tried to persuade Shi Hong. Once you kill someone, it’s hard to turn back. It would be better to just beat up a few—those little… kids, film it and post it online. That would still make Li Guojian and the others panic. And Song An’an was innocent—if you really silenced her, how much of a bastard would that make you.”

“But Zhao Gang didn’t agree.”

“Two against one, I couldn’t escape. They were afraid I’d call the police, so they held a knife to me and forced me to kill Li Ming, determined to drag me down with them.”

“I was too scared, officer. I was really afraid of death.” As if recalling the scene again, Qian Weiqiang shuddered violently, his voice choking. “So that’s why…”

Lies require nine parts truth and one part falsehood. Anyway, there were no cameras in the warehouse—he could perform however he liked.

Besides, he did indeed try to persuade Shi Hong and Zhao Gang to stop.

——Although the starting point was to more safely flee with the ransom money.

He Linfeng: “How did you know when and where Li Ming and the others would arrange to go out together?”

“It was Shi Hong,” realizing the other party was completely unmoved and showed no sympathy at all, Qian Weiqiang gritted his teeth and revealed more clues. “She works as a cleaner at Beijiang No. 1 Middle School. One day while cleaning the restroom, she overheard Yang Qian, who had skipped class, telling her classmates that she would go to a newly opened amusement park with Li Ming that weekend.”

“At first Shi Hong didn’t care, because among those four kids only Li Ming and Gao Zixuan were relatively close, so it was hard for all of them to end up together.”

“But that amusement park was very popular recently, known as some kind of couple dating holy place. Yang Qian probably didn’t want her classmates to misunderstand, or didn’t want rumors with Li Ming, so she explained that there would be others going too—Gao Zixuan and Xu Hao from the neighboring class, counting as Li Ming hosting the gathering.”

“Shi Hong had been ‘undercover’ at the school for half a year. It was the first time she encountered such a perfect opportunity, so she sent messages to me and Zhao Gang that very day.”

“She said Yang Qian was the most spoiled one—usually complaining she was tired after doing a bit of work, and she liked taking photos with various plush toys and posting them on Weibo. She would be easier to lure than the others.”

“Plus the weather forecast said temperatures would rise over the weekend, so Shi Hong bought clothes herself, rented machines for making juice and ice cream, and pretended to run a promotional tasting event for a new shop near the amusement park.”

“She suffered from long-term insomnia and had prescription medication from a doctor. As long as we tricked Yang Qian and the others into eating it, that would basically complete more than half the plan. Then we could have Zhao Gang park a car nearby and pretend to be a passing kind uncle. Even if someone noticed something wrong, we could forcibly drag them into the car.”

“The final step was too risky. I advised them to reconsider, but Zhao Gang didn’t agree. He said things like ‘kill one if you can, I can’t wait anymore.’”

However, Qian Weiqiang did not expect that from the very beginning of the plan, everything would go so smoothly. Even with Song An’an added in, it still didn’t affect the overall situation.

He poured out the details like beans spilling from a bamboo tube, carefully omitting his own role in it, only occasionally inserting a few “I”s so as not to appear too deliberate.

He Linfeng said with a half-smile, “So you feel pretty wronged.”

He looked quite simple and easy to fool.

Same-sex repels same-sex; he always felt there was something under this man’s skin that made his scalp tingle. Qian Weiqiang couldn’t figure out what the other meant and cautiously chose not to respond.

“Was the threatening call made by you?” The man jumped to the next question abruptly. “And then you threw the phone at the unfinished building?”

Qian Weiqiang hesitated for two seconds. “Yes.”

From the perspective of the whole plan, the verbal threat was one of the most “harmless” steps. Since he wasn’t sure whether it had been caught on surveillance, there was no need to lie about such a small matter and ruin his image of full cooperation.

He Linfeng: “Alone?”

Qian Weiqiang: “Yes.”

“Shi Hong and the others were afraid that making phone calls in the warehouse would be tracked…”

“Why didn’t you call the police?” He Linfeng cut off his rambling as he completed the missing piece.

The busy scapegoat-throwing Qian Weiqiang froze for a moment. “Huh?”

“Why didn’t you call the police?” He repeated patiently. “You said your act of killing Li Ming was due to being threatened by Shi Hong, but during the trips to and from the unfinished building, you were alone.”

“No knives, no violence. Shi Hong and Zhao Gang were even dozens of kilometers away from you. If you truly didn’t want to do it, you could have surrendered at any time.”

Qian Weiqiang hurriedly said, “Because I didn’t think they would actually do it!”

“You can save those words for court,” He Linfeng said calmly. “I will also verify these statements with Shi Hong and Zhao Gang.”

Qian Weiqiang’s face fell into a ashen expression.

In a three-person crime, there would always be one mastermind who received the heaviest sentence. How could Shi Hong and Zhao Gang help him exonerate himself? They would definitely be scrambling to shift blame like him.

Contrary to Qian Weiqiang’s expectations, the interrogation room next door was extremely silent.

No matter what Yan Qiuyu asked, Shi Hong—her wrists cuffed—sat expressionlessly in the chair like a dead, decayed piece of wood, saying nothing at all.

The suspect had been caught red-handed at the crime scene, so the other party indeed had little room left for argument. However, suspects who completely lose the desire to speak were quite rare in Yan Qiuyu’s professional experience.

For example, Zhao Gang, handled by Wang Lai—when she had walked past carrying documents, she could still hear through the door the latter cursing Li Guojian and the others loudly.

Shi Hong’s failed revenge seemed to have completely drained her mental support, becoming the final straw that crushed her.

Prison, execution—anything was fine.

Anyway, she had long since lost everything.

The chain of evidence was real and logically consistent; the crimes of Shi Hong and the other two were already firmly established. After half an hour of one-sided output, Yan Qiuyu decisively ended the meaningless confrontation and, together with Zhou Shan, brought Shi Hong out of the interrogation room.

She did not expect, however, that in the corridor they would run head-on into Mr. and Mrs. Li Guojian, who had been detained by the economic investigation unit and were about to be taken to different interrogation rooms for questioning.

Enemies meeting on a narrow road. Mrs. Li, her hair disheveled, stared blankly, no longer carrying any trace of the “madam” elegance she once had. The moment she saw Shi Hong, she suddenly broke free from restraint and lunged forward like a madwoman.

“Give me back my son! Give me back my son!” She cried miserably, as if she wanted to tear a piece of flesh off the other woman. “He’s only sixteen! He’s only sixteen!”

“You have such a cruel heart!”

——Hemorrhagic shock had caused prolonged insufficient oxygen supply to the brain. Although Li Ming had been saved, he remained in a coma, his condition capable of worsening at any time, with a very high probability of becoming a vegetative state.

“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” With police firmly restraining her body, Mrs. Li’s eyes were about to split with rage. “She harmed Mingming! I’m going to make this bitch pay with her life!”

Li Guojian, who had always despised his wife for being embarrassing, surprisingly did not stop her this time: families like Gao and Yang, who held smaller shares, had worked overnight to gather compensation payments, while he, who had spent a large sum buying land, was left with only insolvency and bankruptcy as the final outcome.

He also did not step in to help.

Even at this moment, Li Guojian stubbornly maintained his so-called “upper-class” demeanor, even though in others’ eyes he already looked utterly disheveled, with unshaven stubble and dark circles under his eyes.

Upstart.

He hated nothing more than being called that.

Amid numbness and madness, Shi Hong—standing quietly behind Yan Qiuyu—suddenly recalled herself before her daughter died.

She had borrowed money from every relative and friend she could find, harassed doctors almost shamelessly, and even thrown away her dignity by kneeling in front of security guards at several companies, humbly begging for that little bit of life-saving money.

That little bit of compensation that should have originally belonged to her.

Then she revealed her first expression after being arrested.

Forcing the corners of her mouth upward, Shi Hong opened her mouth wide and gave an exaggerated, grotesque smile.

Her pain, her helplessness, all her resentment and unwillingness—at this moment, all of it successfully transferred onto the perpetrators in the same form.

Li Ming might have been innocent.

But if it happened again, she would still kidnap those children.

For those living in hell, conscience is a luxury.

“Be glad,” Shi Hong said faintly, meeting another mother’s eyes across the police holding order.

“At least your son is still alive.”